Bit of a spin-off from this morning's run...
Apart from making you as giddy as a new born lamb sometimes, running is great thinking time. You can sort through any niggling issues and sometimes come up with quite interesting solutions. Now I don't know if that's because you're in some semi altered state because of what your body is doing but I've come up with some really quite creative ideas for work problems while I've been running.
Anyway - getting to the point. On my way down the river I was thinking about the play I saw on Friday night, The Crucible, and McCarthyism, which inspired it, and where we are now and what it has to say about how we behave in the 21st century.
But it struck me that vile though McCarthyism was, as a whole the world used to be better balanced in the 1950s. Yes the whole Reds Under the Beds thing was born from paranoia over Communism and, flawed through it undoubtedly was, it did at least exist as a balance in the world. Things have got to be balanced haven't they? Ying and Yang, black and white, left and right.
But where is the balance today? It seems to me that right-wing thinking is more or less global since the shift in world politics began in the Eighties. From the US to Europe to India to China to Australia every society seems to be moving in the same direction. Where is the Left? Cuba?
We read this morning that an MP was possibly been bugged while visiting a constituent in jail. I think the real horror story is I'm not a bit surprised and I doubt you are either.
So, sometimes I do think we're all going to hell in a basket, the 21st century is turning out to be pretty rubbish and frankly I'd like one of these.
Good old Bill....
GB