DELETE.

Not a story but a piece of opinion concerning an increasingly troubled world

The great thing about computer operating systems is the way you can do something, decide that it was a mistake, and undo it. Even word processing packages allow you to do this, say delete a paragraph, wish you hadn’t deleted it and with the click of your mouse on a single icon, return it to its original place in your text. It’s all very helpful.

And most will agree with this until we start thinking more deeply. We get in our heads the fact that anything we do can be undone if it turns out to be a mistake. We can even take our computers back to an earlier point in time in order to get rid of something deeply buried in its software, some error that turns out to cause chaos in the way they work.

And all this fills many of us with the certainty that nothing is permanent. If we make a mistake in life then with a mental rodent click we can eradicate it. And that’s one of the things that seems to be going wrong with the world.

If I was an American I would start on about President Trump and how we, the American people, elected him in a world which only takes a click to dispose of him is he turns out to be the disaster that something at the backs of our minds suggested he might be when we went to vote. But I’m not American, so I’ll skip that.

I’m a Brit and becoming increasingly disenchanted with the way my country is teetering along.

There was the EU referendum which has done a lot of damage, some of it to mathematics because a vote of 37% in a 2-horse race is called a majority and we must go along with the will of that majority. Fair enough, though 37% was never anyone’s majority when I was learning percentages at school, and it’s plain outrageous that it has been assumed that those who for reasons best known to themselves failed to vote at all really meant to be included in the “leave” camp. They should have thought before they didn’t vote say those trumpeting their triumph in a faulty vote, but many of those were probably so confused by the dreadful lies told by politicians and painted on the side of a bus for all to see that they thought themselves unqualified to have a meaningful opinion.

But the result, contrary to most things in our on-line silicon chip world, can’t be undone with a click of a button. They stand there as irrefutable facts and, somehow, 37% has become a majority, the problems of our country are all because of an army of illegal immigrants and EU nationals who are stealing our jobs and the European parliament has passed dastardly laws that go against everything we stand for, though nobody can think of what one of those laws might be. Oh, and the NHS will be enriched by a huge £350million a week.

And so we near, as a nation, the precipice, and unlike Windows 10 it won’t flicker out of being at the press of the off switch. We are going, as a nation, back to an earlier date (like you can on Windows) but for all the wrong reasons because immigrants will still swell our population, the NHS will still be sold off until it resembles the American health services, which is what our Government most desires because it just has to follow a right-wing capitalist philosophy, blindly and to the point of destruction if need be.

So the leaving of the EU won’t solve immigration and other social problems like it was supposed to. What it will do is return us to an earlier age.

To 1000+ years of European wars. It wasn’t just the 20^th century that was ravaged by armed conflict, though that was arguably the worst. But Europe has been the battleground for many, many conflicts and it seems that a unity in the shape of the European Union has reduced the chance of fresh bloody arguments breaking out. I think it was Churchill who suggested that it would be a damned good idea for the European nations to draw closer together.

But break up the EU and nobody can be sure what will emerge to fill the vacuum left by the departure of cooperation.

And all these things can’t be erased by the click of a mouse. The flawed referendum happened, we are where we are. Once in the future we won’t be able to return to the present. So, in order to stand proud in the world, our Government will try to forge trading unions with other countries, some of them unstable, some of them dominated by an ideology we find reprehensible but what the heck, trade is trade even if that trade is in weapons that will be used to kill children.

And as all the signposts to fascism (the ideology that almost destroyed this planet last century), are being put in place, the use of mass media to order the people, the increasing persecution of minorities, the slow erasure of human rights, the obsession with nationalism and hatred of foreigners and loads of other poisons, I fear for a future with no barriers to the unrestrained power enjoyed by a dictator class that is already solidifying from the social soup like great greedy globs of rampant cronyism.

Where’s my mouse?

Dictators again?

DELETE.

© Peter Rogerson 10.01.18