Mindsets

Funny old World, isn’t it?  One man’s meat is another man’s poison, sort of thing.

As long as you don’t actually say it.

It’s like this.

People love dogs.  I can accept that.  There is nothing wrong with enjoying the companionship of some semi-tame, semi-domesticated pack animal.

Trouble comes with the expression: “I dislike dogs intensely.”

Suddenly you are a pariah.  You are not allowed, in the public eye, to dislike dogs.  Or cats.  You are only permitted to like them.

Of course, to me, any animal that licks its arse and then licks your face is asking for ejection from the immediate vicinity by boot-propulsion.

There is, you understand, hypocrisy here.  It is a free country; you are entitled to your own point of view—no question, as long as it conforms to everyone else’s point of view.

I spent twenty-seven years in the military.  For about twenty of those years I was teetotal.  Oops!  Not allowed.  People in the Services who do not drink are very suspect.  Possibly they are not real men (women, too), they are, certainly, not ‘one of the lads’.  Which, for me, was acceptable other than having to put up with ‘secondary drinking’.

I was often told that there is no such thing as ‘secondary drinking’ in the same way as there is ‘secondary smoking’, which is much, much worse.

Perhaps you should tell some poor wight that just been poled off his motorbike by some drunken clown in a Ford Focus that there is no such thing as ‘secondary drinking’!

Maybe you could emphasize to somebody who has to get up early for shift-work that the guy(s) singing their head(s) off outside his house at two in the morning are “only trying to enjoy themselves”!

Then there are vegans!  It’s fine to be a vegan.  I have absolutely no objection to anyone choosing to be a vegetarian or vegan or whatever.  Be what you want to be.

Please do not tell me that I should be a vegan as well.  My teeth were designed to be omnivorous.  My digestive tract was designed over several million years to eat whatever I could pick, dig up, drag out of the water or kill.  I like meat.  Especially fish.  I love fish.  Please resist the temptation to tell me what is wrong with me eating fish; I will not listen.

Note that, if you like milk, that cows only give milk after they have given birth—they are much like humans in that respect.  What are you going to do with all those calves that are starving to death because we are drinking their Mum’s milk?

I know!  I have a plan.  We will kill them and have veal in sandwiches or lightly fried in breadcrumbs as a schnitzel.  Wonderful for us and it is not a problem for the calves because they will be dead.

We shall try, very hard, not to anthropomorphise them; they are not ‘different looking people’, they are not like children and they are not ‘cute’.  They are animals.  They do not laugh, cry, tell jokes or understand what you say to them. 

They are food on legs, for the most part.

Except dogs and cats.  They are not food for us.  But, still, they do not understand us.  Dogs lick our face not out of affection but because this is the way they beg for food from the Alpha Male/Female in the pack.

If it has just been cleaning up its rear end...

But we are not allowed to say these things.  It is all right to be proud of being, for example, vegan but it is not good to say that you love eating meat—it is not ‘politically correct’.

It is fine and patriotic to be proud of being Scottish, Welsh, Irish, Malawian or whatever but it is bad taste to be proud of being English.  We must be British.  Well, I’m not.  I’m English.  And I’m proud of it.

While we’re about it, I’m not homosexual, either.  That’s something else I’m not allowed to mention, isn’t it?  We are supposed to support homosexuals, we are meant to say they are fine, good chaps, etc.

They are not gay.  A maypole is gay, a bunch of flowers in the hands of a child dancing is gay; homosexuals are not gay.

The Torah, the Bible and the Q’ran all say that homosexuality is a no, no.  Keep it in the closet.  I don’t mind anybody having weird sexual preferences but I don’t want to know about it.  I don’t want ‘same sex’ marriages or two people of the same sex adopting children.

I don’t flaunt the fact that I’m heterosexual over and above the fact that I’m married—and happily so, thank you very much.  Please don’t flash your homosexuality about in parades, and newspaper articles, it is not seemly.

Be what you want to be but keep it to yourself like civilised people do.

But we can’t talk about that.  It isn’t politically correct.  People don’t like it.

That means you must not write about it.  Start putting opinions in your stories about things that people don’t like and they are going to throw your book on the fires and chant slogans about you.

There are certain sections of the UK population that are, primarily, immigrants.  They like to hold noisy rallies to complain about the country that they have chosen to live in; they wish to change it to their way of thinking.  Apart from the idea that, if they do not like their situation in UK then they should return from whence they came, why can they not integrate and conform to the customs, traditions and laws of their chosen country of residence.

We are not allowed to say anything about them even if they can say as they wish about us.

Of course, you will note that few of them have best-selling books in UK.

Your story does not have to be politically bland but far-reaching views that are not politically correct are definitely to be kept for the pamphlets.

Or ‘Blogs’?