SOAPBOX
I'VE NEVER BEEN KNOWN NOT TO FORM AN OPINION AND WHAT'S THE POINT IN HAVING ONE IF YOU'RE NOT WILLING TO SHARE IT?
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The Next Big Pandemic: Xenophobia
Fear of foreigners is contagious and a valued political tool. I hope you forgive the title for this article on the grounds that xenophobia1 is not a medical condition, but to my mind it is a sickness. It’s believed to be governed by the area of the human brain called the amygdala, where a fear reaction triggers the fight or flight response and is regulated in the pre-frontal cortex. “The prefrontal cortex is a large and complex part of the brain that is involved in executive functions, such as planning, decision-making, and self-control. Many psychiatric disorders and neurological conditions are associated with deficits in cognitive control (CC) and/or dysfunction of the prefrontal cortex (PFC)2”. Therefore, it is reasonable to consider xenophobia as a sickness based on an irrational fear of the ‘other’. I need to think of…
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Sympathy, Empathy & Meme Talk
I remember when sympathy was seen as something worth offering. You certainly were expected to offer it to people when they lost a loved one, fell on hard times, lost a job, or were ill or in pain. After all if we needed a measure of how important sympathy once was we only have to look at the volume of sympathy cards in card shops – Hallmark certainly still has faith in its place in the world. Full disclosure: I’ve never been very good at offering sympathy. Don’t get me wrong, I do feel sympathetic when I encounter people in any of the aforementioned scenarios, I’m not a psychopath (maybe), I just never feel comfortable actually sympathising with them verbally. Funerals are the worst. I can never join the queue to shake hands with the…
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Thoughts, Decisions & Feelings
Earlier this week I needed to take a right turn up a country road that takes me home (queue the music). Keeping in mind we drive on the left here in currently sun kissed Ireland, that meant I had to cut across traffic. Normally that might involve avoiding a sporadic car driving too fast around the oncoming bends, but on this occasion there was relative gridlock because of a slow moving farm vehicle stacked high with something wrapped in plastic (I live in the country, I’m not a country boy – like John Denver for instance – even though he was in fact an army brat and not a farmer’s son). A very nice young woman decided not to continue in the funereal procession and stop to let me through. Commendable you might say and you’d…
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Thoughts on Retirement
It’s NOT All About the Money Having surfed the internet for a long while now I can confirm most of the content produced in relation to retirement is about getting the finances right before you take the leap. That is an understandable perspective and is justified given the vagaries of the economy over the past couple of decades. I’m an old-fashioned sort of guy in many ways and like a lot of people of my generation I never got involved in stocks and shares or speculation of any kind. I saved when I could, paid my contributions to my work pension scheme, and kept my fingers crossed. I’m not recommending that as a strategy, but it was how I did it. At times in the years running up to my anticipated retirement I was so sure I…
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Kamala Harris & The Democratic Convention
Apologies to Stephen King but as I read the title for this post I couldn’t help thinking about his short story – Rita Hayworth & The Shawshank Redemption – not the story itself just the rhythm of the title. It, like the title of this post, has the ring of a name for a 1960s Motown band. That I’m afraid is the only place where all three intersect. The first is genius, the band might have had some potential, but this is likely to be a rambling rant. To paraphrase the old saying, we all know opinions are like a’holes – everbody’s got one and they’re all full of shit. It’s a line I use regularly and everytime I do I’m conscious it includes me. So of course this post should be read with that caveat firmly…
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The God of Small Things
All my life I’ve had a problem finding value in the day-to-day actions of everyday life. It’s not that I craved constant drama or anything of that sort, in fact I tend to shy away from drama even when it’s a genuine crisis. I just never learned to worship at the altar of the God of small things. Maybe it’s repetition that causes me a problem, although I just spent hours over the past three days organising hundreds of music files by dragging them to new locations on a hard drive. Or possibly the lack of challenge involved in doing things that require little or no new learning. It could be the pointlessness of doing something, like cleaning or repairing, that will simply need to be done again and probably sooner rather than later. Honestly I don’t…
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Toxic Masculinity & The Emerging World Order
I have to admit I’ve always had a fear of the pendulum effect when it comes to societal developments. Like every other person who welcomes improvement in equality and the practice of tolerance and respect, I celebrate every step forward with a sense of joy and a sigh of relief. These steps go a long way to help restore my faith in humanity in general and those who take risks to benefit others in particular. But there has always been a faint murmur of concern at the back of my mind when those changes appear to be part of a wave of change rather than a constantly mounting ripple of reform. Newtons Law of action and reaction comes to mind – for every action (force) in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction. That’s what I…
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Regrets & How To Fix Them
Lucky old Edith Piaf had none but, like Sinatra, I reckon when we reach our sixties we all have at least a few, regrets that is. Relax, my Irishness won’t allow me to use this time together to roll out the few I have – too few to mention? – even though it might be a lot less expensive than a therapist (something else being Irish sees as totally alien). What I really wanted to chew the fat about was the notion of regret when you retire and have to reinvent yourself once again. I say once again because in reality we do that a few times over a lifetime, from child to adult, to partner, to parent, but each of those reinventions are gradual over time and influenced by role models and society’s requirements. Post-retirement, or…
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WHAT HAVE WE BECOME?
The second statistic informed me that 10 women are murdered each year in Ireland by their husband or partner in their own home. At home where they should be safest and by the one person they thought would love and protect them. I don’t recall their sad demise being reported in banner headlines and that’s probably because it’s no longer “news”. What does it say about a society that accepts that homelessness and violence are acceptable and especially at a time when we’re congratulating ourselves on how well we’re recovering from the recession. There’s never been more money floating in this country apparently and the future’s looking bright (or so they say…again). However, none of that recovery seems to have made a difference to those who live in fear of losing the roof over their head or…
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THE FAILED GENERATION
PHOTO: Franklin / AP “I was a child in the sixties Dreams could be held through TV With Disney, and Cronkite, and Martin Luther Oh, I believed, I believed, I believed Nanci Griffith – It’s A Hard Life I’m in my mid-fifties and I was a child of the sixties. I grew up with the momentum of foreign protests igniting protest marches in my own country aimed at restoring civil rights to minorities that couldn’t be distinguished by colour, but was based on religious belief. I enjoyed the hope of the technological revolution during the”power years” of my late-20s and early 30s. We enjoyed the drive for equality in a country that at one time lagged behind the rest of the developed word by a decade. Equality brought about by the kind of unity that EU membership offered a…
