Smudger Snippets
Created | Updated Jan 7, 2009
I suppose it's because I have so much time on my hands these days, that all these memories come flooding back to me.
The Politically Correct Brigade
Well that is the title I give them! These are the people who sit away in an office somewhere and dream up all these silly and sometimes stupid rules that we have to live by these days. In fact, even while I write this, there's the thought that it's going to banned or withdrawn for the site for one reason or another, but I will carry on anyway, as it gets all these frustrations I have off my chest. As I have mentioned before, I visit my favourite ex service site every night and this subject has a thread of its very own. The folk on that site find stories in the press that show just how ridiculous some of them are, and post them on the site; they always get plenty of responses, some serious but mostly humorous ones. I suppose us being allowed to poke fun at those stories indicates that we still have some remnants of freedom of speech, albeit on a web site and not spoken out aloud in the street, as if we did that I am sure we would end up in some kind of trouble, probably because we infringed on someone’s human rights. That is another subject we also talk about on that site, and it draws the same amount of banter as the earlier subject mentioned. In a recent story for example, a man who had hit a burglar who had broken into his house with a golf club, was sued by the said burglar for the injury caused, and did indeed win his case for compensation. He said in court that his human rights to carry on with his profession as a burglar had indeed been infringed by that incident and the court agreed with his case.
Of course such stories are always in the news, and because they happen so often these days, our reaction to them is somewhat muted, and not as outraged as they would have been a few years ago.
Of course we can simply laugh these off and call them humorous, but the fact they occur so often is not really as humorous as we think. Another modern day subject that often appears on that web site is Health and Safety regulations. When they first came into being, well at least in my memory, way back in the early seventies, they did in fact make our work space a lot safer for us to work in. I myself was a health and safety representative, voted in by my fellow work mates and I did attend meetings with the management. Although not all our suggestions were taken on board however, it tended to be based on the price that any changes would cost, both in money and loss of production. Yet I can’t help but think that it has all got a bit out of hand these days, with more and more silly instances appearing in the press. For example, a house owner was fined fifty pounds by his local council, because his wheelie bin lid was open by four inches, indicating that it was too full. Or even more local than that, our council recently backed up a bin man who had refused to empty a wheelie bin, because the handle was not facing the street, making him have to turn it around, and he said that this was a breach of the Health and Safety regulations. I could go on and write pages of other such silly instances, but I won’t because to be honest I get really annoyed about it.
One incident in particular is the one that has been in the national press recently, where some councils have banned their traditional Christmas trees and street decorations as it offends the non Christian population. Even worse than that, some have even gone as far as banning the word Christmas and change it to a Winter Festival. I find that reprehensible and there is no way I will ever stop calling it Christmas. On the subject of Christmas I read in the press recently that they are banning the traditional Christmas nativity play in some schools because it is not politically correct! It was not long ago when they brought out a law banning parents from filming such nativity plays in a bid to stop paedophiles from having access to them. I have no idea what they are going to come up with in the coming year, but one thing is for sure, they will bring in some more of these silly rules, the same ones that get people like me really angry. When I was working overseas I had to obey that country's laws and respect their customs, and I had no problem with that, as I was the foreigner in their country. With that in mind, why should we have to change our customs and way of life to suit people who come into this country and find them offensive? If they do find such things offensive, they are perfectly welcome to return to their own county and way of life, and leave us to carry on with ours. If this Snippet never gets passed the censor to be read, I will at least have had the satisfaction of venting my anger.
Happy New Year to one and all.
