I caught the bus today. It is an unusual event one that I would repeat more often if the buses were accessible but unfortunately in our part of the world we seem to use other peoples cast off old buses, so maybe in a year or two we will get the accessible buses after another town or city has replaced them with more modern ones.
Standing in the queue in the bus station I met a couple of people I know, had a telephone conversation which was listened to, chatted about the weather to another passenger in the queue and was then ushered forward to climb onto the bus by a genial fellow who said, on you go lad you were here before me.
I thought 'lad' was pushing it for 67, but then it seems 2012 is going to continue to be a year of cuts, starting with my age and then moving on to cuts of an altogether more serious kind.
The Labour Party has asked that Capitalism becomes kinder by cutting its profits, cutting top salaries and bonuses and cutting exploitation which only fails to recognise the basic truth of the matter, capitalism has failed, we need a new 'ism to help us face the challenges of the future.
Captain Ska has asked what is the point of Nick Clegg? and even the relatively gentle Harry Eyres,. writing in the FT, has described the Government as 'increasingly peculiar'.
But regressive taxes, challenging changes to the benefits, welfare and health services, are only peculiar if what you are striving to achieve is to promote humanity or what the church calls the common good, if your aim is beggar my neighbour style division it's not so peculiar.
If 2012 is to be a new year of cuts or a year of new cuts, then my New Year Resolution is that we adopt a totally alternative CUTS agenda.
In my CUTS agenda, I want the word cuts to act as an acronym for 2012, it will become the year when Culture, Unity, Trust and Spirituality came to fore, CUTS are the way forward but understood in a new and radical way.
Culture: should be the leading edge through which we rediscover what it means to be fully human, art, music, poetry, literature, writing, both classical and modern should be encouraged.
D H Lawrence should be championed as the writer for this generation as he was for his own, he recognised that there was little dignity in industrial work, which demeaned human beings, now with technologies that Lawrence could only have dreamt of, we have it in our powers to become truly human.
Lawrence not only celebrated the human potential of working people he also celebrated the equality that should exist between the sexes, a recent re-reading of Lady Chatterley impressed me with its vision of and for a greater more inclusive humanity.
Great music energises us, allows us to respond to the rhythms of nature, whether it is classical or pop is of no consequence, as we fill our lives with music, great music, music that seeks and expresses truth, so we will like, the primitive humanoids in Space Odyssey, rise in fulfilment of our human potentialities.
In Genoa at the Van Gogh exhibition I stood transfixed by the self portrait, it was an unflinching and almost brutally honest meditation by the artist confronting his own humanity and it said clearly I am HUMAN.
All artists should be given the support and encouragement of our society because they offer us an opportunity to confront our own humanity with hope.
Unity, at the present time the notion that we 'are all in this together' is neither believed nor can it be demonstrated. We are not all in this together. There is great wealth in our society, financial services, banking, technology, creative industries, research and development, if not manufacture, although the UK car industry under Japanese and Indian ownership, is proving the exception to that general rule, all produce enormous wealth which, if it was used as it is in the Scandinavian countries, would make us all richer and more at ease with ourselves.
By Unity I do not mean the false idea that hosting the Olympics or even celebrating a diamond Jubilee will bring us together in some common bond. By Unity I mean a commonality of purpose, aim and expression.
In Norway people leave the lights on all year round. It somehow encourages the notion of a society comfortable in its own skin and able to confront challenges more confidently.
Trust will almost inevitably follow if we are united in a common purpose. Currently the con-dem project is leading to increasing numbers of children living in actual not relative poverty. It is leading to people becoming uncertain about the future, especially if they are older or more vulnerable through disability or chronic illness. It is leading to people feeling betrayed by the democratic project as policies for which they didn't vote are being introduced, it seems, on an almost daily basis.
And because Trust has been betrayed there is a feeling that, Oh well you can't trust politicians so the devil you know, which raises the awful possibility that this administration may well survive for a second term through the inertia of an electorate that has lost faith in the political system.
So it is an urgent task facing the political parties that trust is restored if democracy is to survive.
Which leaves me with Spirituality. The matter of the spirit immediately conjures up what might be called the Dawkins/Pulman question.
But spirituality is about more than the existence or not of God. As Hans Kung, the Theologian commented on the Adagio of Mozart's Clarinet Concerto in A major K. 622 on his first hearing of it, it was as though a window opened into heaven.
But spirituality is also about how the great faith's can learn to co-exist in an open society.
We are all people of the book, we share a common ancestry, we are all children of Abraham, we are all humanists in the sense that we have experienced God in the face of a human, Moses, Jesus, The Prophet (PBUH) and that should lead us to recognise that we always encounter the divine in our fellow human beings.
My first experience of studying for the Priesthood over forty years ago was a year studying Christian Humanism, the syllabus was largely, English Literature, Greek Philosophy and Law with some Bible Study thrown in for good measure. I am sure that both Jewish and Islamic students would have found the course equally compelling because it addressed the question what makes us and what keeps us, Human?
So there you have it, Culture, Unity, Trust, Spirituality let's make 2012 the year of CUTS and make sure that we don't miss the bus.
Standing in the queue in the bus station I met a couple of people I know, had a telephone conversation which was listened to, chatted about the weather to another passenger in the queue and was then ushered forward to climb onto the bus by a genial fellow who said, on you go lad you were here before me.
I thought 'lad' was pushing it for 67, but then it seems 2012 is going to continue to be a year of cuts, starting with my age and then moving on to cuts of an altogether more serious kind.
The Labour Party has asked that Capitalism becomes kinder by cutting its profits, cutting top salaries and bonuses and cutting exploitation which only fails to recognise the basic truth of the matter, capitalism has failed, we need a new 'ism to help us face the challenges of the future.
Captain Ska has asked what is the point of Nick Clegg? and even the relatively gentle Harry Eyres,. writing in the FT, has described the Government as 'increasingly peculiar'.
But regressive taxes, challenging changes to the benefits, welfare and health services, are only peculiar if what you are striving to achieve is to promote humanity or what the church calls the common good, if your aim is beggar my neighbour style division it's not so peculiar.
If 2012 is to be a new year of cuts or a year of new cuts, then my New Year Resolution is that we adopt a totally alternative CUTS agenda.
In my CUTS agenda, I want the word cuts to act as an acronym for 2012, it will become the year when Culture, Unity, Trust and Spirituality came to fore, CUTS are the way forward but understood in a new and radical way.
Culture: should be the leading edge through which we rediscover what it means to be fully human, art, music, poetry, literature, writing, both classical and modern should be encouraged.
D H Lawrence should be championed as the writer for this generation as he was for his own, he recognised that there was little dignity in industrial work, which demeaned human beings, now with technologies that Lawrence could only have dreamt of, we have it in our powers to become truly human.
Lawrence not only celebrated the human potential of working people he also celebrated the equality that should exist between the sexes, a recent re-reading of Lady Chatterley impressed me with its vision of and for a greater more inclusive humanity.
Great music energises us, allows us to respond to the rhythms of nature, whether it is classical or pop is of no consequence, as we fill our lives with music, great music, music that seeks and expresses truth, so we will like, the primitive humanoids in Space Odyssey, rise in fulfilment of our human potentialities.
In Genoa at the Van Gogh exhibition I stood transfixed by the self portrait, it was an unflinching and almost brutally honest meditation by the artist confronting his own humanity and it said clearly I am HUMAN.
All artists should be given the support and encouragement of our society because they offer us an opportunity to confront our own humanity with hope.
Unity, at the present time the notion that we 'are all in this together' is neither believed nor can it be demonstrated. We are not all in this together. There is great wealth in our society, financial services, banking, technology, creative industries, research and development, if not manufacture, although the UK car industry under Japanese and Indian ownership, is proving the exception to that general rule, all produce enormous wealth which, if it was used as it is in the Scandinavian countries, would make us all richer and more at ease with ourselves.
By Unity I do not mean the false idea that hosting the Olympics or even celebrating a diamond Jubilee will bring us together in some common bond. By Unity I mean a commonality of purpose, aim and expression.
In Norway people leave the lights on all year round. It somehow encourages the notion of a society comfortable in its own skin and able to confront challenges more confidently.
Trust will almost inevitably follow if we are united in a common purpose. Currently the con-dem project is leading to increasing numbers of children living in actual not relative poverty. It is leading to people becoming uncertain about the future, especially if they are older or more vulnerable through disability or chronic illness. It is leading to people feeling betrayed by the democratic project as policies for which they didn't vote are being introduced, it seems, on an almost daily basis.
And because Trust has been betrayed there is a feeling that, Oh well you can't trust politicians so the devil you know, which raises the awful possibility that this administration may well survive for a second term through the inertia of an electorate that has lost faith in the political system.
So it is an urgent task facing the political parties that trust is restored if democracy is to survive.
Which leaves me with Spirituality. The matter of the spirit immediately conjures up what might be called the Dawkins/Pulman question.
But spirituality is about more than the existence or not of God. As Hans Kung, the Theologian commented on the Adagio of Mozart's Clarinet Concerto in A major K. 622 on his first hearing of it, it was as though a window opened into heaven.
But spirituality is also about how the great faith's can learn to co-exist in an open society.
We are all people of the book, we share a common ancestry, we are all children of Abraham, we are all humanists in the sense that we have experienced God in the face of a human, Moses, Jesus, The Prophet (PBUH) and that should lead us to recognise that we always encounter the divine in our fellow human beings.
My first experience of studying for the Priesthood over forty years ago was a year studying Christian Humanism, the syllabus was largely, English Literature, Greek Philosophy and Law with some Bible Study thrown in for good measure. I am sure that both Jewish and Islamic students would have found the course equally compelling because it addressed the question what makes us and what keeps us, Human?
So there you have it, Culture, Unity, Trust, Spirituality let's make 2012 the year of CUTS and make sure that we don't miss the bus.
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