About Me

"Setting the world to rights"...one blog at a time! Plus anything else that comes to mind

Friday 12 March 2010

2 Where do we fit in?

Before going further I think it’s important to understand ‘society’ and our individual role in it. To my mind - bottom line - it’s a group of like-minded people living together, working towards survival.

Every single one of us, from Lands End to John O’Groats, from western Ireland to East Anglia, from the inner cities to the remotest farm belongs to this society, benefits from this society and therefore has responsibilities to this society. In order for a society to work the members of that society have to agree to co-operate according to agreed common rules and we have to accept that we all have to do our part. We seem to have lost this sense of cohesion and responsibility. We all need to change our attitude!

It’s no use saying, for example, “I don’t have children, why should I pay for education?” If society’s children don’t get educated they won’t be able to contribute their bit towards society when they grow up; there won’t be doctors and nurses to treat us, no bus drivers to take us to the hospitals, no farmers to grow the food we need to eat to keep us healthy…

…nor is it any use saying “I don’t drive/don’t use the roads on the other side of the country, why should I pay for their upkeep?” The city worker relies on the transport system to bring food from the country grown by the farmers. The farmer relies on the city workers to buy his produce to give him a living so he can in turn buy their goods and services…

…it’s certainly no use saying “I can’t work because there’re no jobs that interest me”. While a large enough society can afford to look after some members who are, through no fault of their own, either temporarily or permanently unable to contribute, even a large society will eventually fail if the proportion of non-contributors to contributors is too high.

Whoops, the battery's low, the next blog will have to wait for another time.

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