There is a loop around the fields at the back of my daughters house, it follows an old track leading up to the disused railway line, called The Dandy' which proved too steep for Stephenson's Rocket to gain proper traction. Eventually an inclined plane was installed whereby the heavy wagons full of Coal and Zinc descended from Tindale to Brampton dragging the empty wagons back up to the smelting works and mines. Once upon a time the area was heavily industrialised, there was a foul miasmic mist from the smeltings and permanently smoking fires from the smelting. It was likened to hell itself.
The grandchildren today discover 'treasures', old bottles, clinker and crystals.
Now on a sunny day it is heavenly by comparison, a bright sun, wildlife thriving, Salmon running up the stream to spawn, alive with grouse, pheasant and rabbits the dogs love to chase. So today, whilst my daughter was occupied with the new baby I walked the dogs. They run and run through the fields, chase the scent trails of rabbits and just chase to their hearts delight. And today the moles were announcing spring with their tunnelling.
Today it is an RSPB preserve.
It goes to show, no matter how much damage we do, the earth has a remarkable capacity to recover. The story is one of nations, civilizations, cultures, Conspiring over time to destroy themselves and recover in a repeating pattern of hubris and nemesis.
So it is with Goverments and Bankers. Greed is Greed however it is justified. Mrs. Thatchers 'trickle down theory' of wealth percolating throughout society as long as the rich were left free to make money as it was spent it would trickle down through the economy benefitting each layer was shown to be both false and untrue. It soon became clear who got the pies, who avoided the taxes and who got the bonuses.
As then so now, this Tory led, learner Government, will dig deeper for the hubris that will in time overwhelm it and it will be replaced and as the Liberals are now all but unelectable, it will likely be a government formed by the labour party. But hubris will be waiting as it did for Gordon Brown. So now we need to learn the lesson, once and for all, that has been spelled put by Wilkinson and Pickett in their crucial book 'The Spirit Level' that if we want a happier, healthier, stronger society, one that is more at ease with itself, than we need to be legislating for greater equality. See www.equalitytrust.org.uk.
A new grandchild causes you to ask some pretty fundamental questions: How will she benefit from the latest bonus announcement by a leading bank?
Almost always the answer is not at all and as The Spirit Level points out, neither will the banker in question, unequal societies have more crime, more social unrest and people have shortet lives than in equal societies. Equal societies are better for all of us, equally.
Where is the pleasure to be gained in the bleak urban sci-fi landscape where the banker leaves the security of the underground car park in his secured living compound to drive through the dangerous streets to the so called security of the guarded underground car park beneath his office to take the private lift to his desk?
The landscape of this part of now rural Cumbria was both bleak and foreboding now it is simply breathtakingly beautiful. Places can change, people can change and as Martin Luther King, quoted in the Spirit Level' observed, 'the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice'
God is, S/he is as S/he is in Jesus so there is hope.
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