Aidan Williams - High Acuity

It’s very rare that I’ll write a negative post, but something happened this morning, which really annoyed me.

I was waiting on the tube platform for a train and these two gentlemen, aged 30 – 35, fully-attired in the latest newly-acquired chav-wear (Moschino, Adidas, Nike, etc), were walking up the platform and one of them was blasting music from his mobile phone.

Everyone else on the platform understandably slowly moved away from these gentlemen, but I stayed where I was reading my newspaper (because I was too lazy to move).

Chav 1: “Nice kicks mate!”
Chav 2: “Yeah man, Nike Air! One hundred and twenty-five quid! I saved up my dole cheques, innit.”
* both laugh *

They go on to talk about how they beat up some guy in a club last night because he was rude to them. Then they discuss how one of them has moved into his girlfriend’s mum’s house and is living there for free. Then they discuss how his girlfriend took her mum’s credit card and bought him a new mobile phone on contract. Then they discuss his recent stint in prison and how he has missed his recent parole meeting and excuses which he can make for not being there. They then continued to blast their on a packed train, while talking/shouting loudly to each other, over the music.

The thing that really gets me in all of this is that these two seem like they’re the happiest people in the world and yet they’re contributing absolutely nothing to society. While the rest of us will feel this global credit crunch and will work through it, it will mean absolutely nothing to them as they feed off the governments and society’s generosity.

The second thing that I find annoying in modern society is the newspapers, or the ‘Harbingers of Doom’ as I like to call them. Metro is the worst of all of them as far as I’m concerned. It’s one of the most depressing things to read and yet we all do on the tube every day. If anything is going to send this country into a depression, it’s our media and I genuinely do blame the media in part for effecting consumer confidence. And unfortunately the solution to a credit crunch is not to suddenly stop spending money as that will effect the economy dramatically just as it is now with the way the pound is falling against the dollar and the euro. Not that I know anything about economics, you understand.

I am generally quite proud of my country, its culture and some of its history, although not many British people say that, but there are lots of things which are completely terrible going on in this country at the moment.

Our London transport system is terrible – other countries manage to do it far cheaper and more efficiently.

As a society, we have a knack for rewarding failure, and achieving any high-level of seniority in a company seems to be an excuse to take full advantage of the company’s resources, including rewarding yourself with high bonuses and ensuring you have a nice golden-parachute set up, just in case your company wants to get rid of you before your contract is complete, possibly because you’ve done a crap job.
Too many people borrow far more money than they can afford and get themselves into insurmountable amounts of debt, until it becomes this dance of shuffling money from place to place to pay each of their bills and debts off. If you can’t afford it now, save up and wait till you can.

Our government is confusing at best at the moment with Labor, Conservatives and even Lib Dems all being virtually identical these days and I have no particular affinity towards any of them at the moment. However it is quite shocking how many of the older generation are supporting the (somewhat openly racist) British National Party, although that could be linked closely with the fact that the Daily Mail is free to everyone over 65, which again goes to demonstrate how our media effects us.

Every newspaper has its agenda and its political leaning, but with all of the political parties being virtually identical these days, it seems as though they’ve all gone doom and gloom on us (far more than usual anyway). As our newspapers are at war with each other to gather more readers, they post more and more depressing stories which I believe will drag this country down with them (there’s my sensationalist doom and gloom comment for this post! find out more in my next post!).

I still love my country and I can’t help but feel that things aren’t quite as bad as the newspapers make them out to be. The sensationalist manner in which our media makes mountains out of mole-hills is extremely annoying a lot of the time and I wish they would relax a bit and post balanced news which is honest, relevant and factual…

… But then again, that wouldn’t attract more readers, would it.

Bring me a newspaper which is fair, honest, balanced, can effectively play devil’s advocate, doesn’t prey on our hopes and fears as a society and I’ll read it every day.