Wednesday 16th August

For years most people were ignorant, they lived in the countryside, there was no radio, no television, newspapers were for the fashionable Londoners.  Actually, as far as their own lives were concerned they may not have been ignorant at all – but the machinations of Kings and Parliaments passed them by.  But for many years now we have been awash with information, and increasingly so.  There is now no excuse for ignorance.

As a child when we had the telly, I was sometimes allowed to watch the News.  I can remember the assassination of President Kennedy and Aberfan particularly.  Everyone watched the news.  It was on at the same time on both channels – you really couldn’t miss it.  And almost everyone wanted to see the News, it was part of their lives. Now we have 24 hour news channels keeping us updated with News, important and trivial – and yet it seems that there is more ignorance than ever.

How often do we hear the plea – “Oh, I don’t understand Politics, it is all the same to me.”  Or that all politicians are the same, or that “I don’t vote, I can’t be bothered.”

Many of the broadsheet newspapers should be prosecuted for even calling themselves newspapers, they are full of tits and celebrity gossip and sport.  The only ‘Politics’ is a diatribe from one side masquerading as news – but which is really propaganda.  But even newspapers are struggling to sell their opinions these days.  With the multiplicity of channels many people never watch the news at all.  I once worked with a woman who couldn’t even tell me who the Prime Minister was – she had no interest in the World around her or the country she lived in.  And yet, she knew the storylines of all the soaps, who was sleeping with who, which Celebrity had had plastic, which was the best mascara and so on.  I once sat on a fairly empty tube train and overheard two youngish women opposite talking about shoes for at least ten tube stops.  And men are just as stupid, football will keep most of them talking for hours.

And just where does this level of ignorance (and this must be deliberate, because you really have to make a decision to avoid knowing what is going on) lead us?  Well, it seems no co-incidence that Trump and Brexit have coincided with such an unprecedented level of ignorance.

And the worst thing is that many of the ignorant wear their stupidity like a badge of honour “Oh, I am too stupid to understand all that stuff” or “I don’t want to know all about Politics, it is so boring.”.  No, you are simply too lazy, too complacent, too self-absorbed to wake up and smell the ersatz coffee in front of you.  Another modern deadly sin I am afraid.