Cassandra

         Cassandra was a character from Greek Mythology who made prophesies. Only trouble was that she was destined never to be believed. The movie “The Cassandra Crossing” was a reasonable representation about a railway bridge which was structurally unsound. Engineers stated that it was unsafe but it fell on deaf ears. Result was that it fell down while a train was crossing it.

   My brother, George, has a theory regarding economists. It is probably somewhat overused, a hackneyed joke, about their profession. He believes that economists have wonderful hindsight.  In other words believing that they are capable of accurate predictions is a false dawn. But economists were predicting the financial crisis of 2008 way before it happened. It seems that Cassandra is alive and well and still kicking around the globe!  A few weeks ago I watched a presentation by Bill Gates from about the year 2015 predicting a pandemic; the climate change scientists were warning of major weather events long before we were beset with floods and fire; and now, of course, people have arrived out of the woodwork telling us that as early as 1994 Putin told us what his intentions were. We seem woefully unprepared on all counts. So all these people are, Dear Friends, entitled to rub our noses in it and preach a smug “I told you so” to the rest of us poor mortals. But are they now?

There are many ideas out there and the problem is that we are in an information saturated world where we really do not know what to believe until it actually happens. And some of us are even overflowing with cynical disbelief until it happens to us personally.  Even when it leaps up and smacks the doubter in the face it remains fake news. I am of the group which feels that it has to trust somebody, indeed on the healthy scepticism graph I probably lie somewhere between “duped naivety” and ‘easily fooled’. But I don’t believe in a flat earth, a moon landing that was faked, conspiracy theories surrounding the Kennedy assassination; that 9/11 was somehow manufactured by the US government. To me, paranoia is a foreign country, they do things differently there. To me, pigs don’t fly, smoking is unhealthy, seat belts are common sense and life expectancy has increased since the Industrial Revolution. I do believe that flush toilets have saved lives, antibiotics work and people are alive today as a result of mainstream medical advances.

 So, Dear Friends, talking of health, hygiene and disease control, please stick with me here a smidge longer if you wouldn’t mind. When the pandemic struck, I was in the Scottish border town of Galashiels. It was an eerie feeling to be far from home with everything closing around me. I walked into town to grab a newspaper and try to get a handle on what was happening. Inevitably I was going to have to bring my holiday to an abrupt, premature end. But on my way into the town I made a quick detour through a graveyard. I am not of a morbid disposition but am endlessly fascinated by local history. Graveyards are a great source. There before me was evidence of how life could be ‘nasty, brutish and short’ as Hobbes would have it. 19th century family graves revealing the names of as many as 5 children from the same family, some as young as one month old, many dead before the age of 5 years,  their short lives are all there written in stone.  They are weathered, some are difficult to read, but close inspection reveals the tragic truth. No false news there. No false news either in the historical statistics which refer to mortality rates during those times, the narrative matches the evidence. I had relatives who lost wives in child birth, a grandfather lost to pneumonia at an early age. These are facts, not some contrivance of a false news report; not some hearsay or heresy or myth; not some flitting foible plucked out of the ethos and presented as the truth by some media hack only interested in shock and awe and far too lazy to bother with research and evidence.  So despite  the irrefutable evidence of the disastrous thalidomide drug that caused babies to be handicapped in the 1960s; despite the drug dependency and overdose deaths which have been created through over prescription; despite evidence of medical procedures which did not always work , I was always going to accept the Covid vaccinations when they became available. Who knows whether my three jabs will bring on dementia or stroke or heart disease? Maybe red wine destroys their effectiveness! There may indeed be long term effects of pouring something alien into my body  but, Dear Friends, in the short term, I am alive and so are the members of my nuclear and extended families. At my time of life I am pretty happy to even have a short term, and why, at well over 60 years of age, should I plan for far down the road!? One should not get greedy, should one? Any rate I spent my formative years exposed to the great British diet so my body knows all there is to know about alien substances.  Steak and kidney pie and chips, spotted dick and custard were more designed to send one off for a nap than to enhance one’s youthful performance on the rugby field.

I often wonder how pessimism and optimism play into a ‘balanced, unbiased’ news report, a medical officer’s advice, a politician making light of crises or making dark of trivialities. It is ridiculous that a news programme should spend time showing us a comedian getting slapped at a gathering of those people whose one talent is acting a part. People whose hidden depths are as shallow as bird baths really shouldn’t figure in a serious newscast, Dear Friends.  Give us a break! A missile into an apartment block in Mariupol, killing the young and the innocent, now that truly is violence. That merits all of our attention and most of our news. It is important also that we hear of that act of emotional violence which bans girls from going to school in Afghanistan. I do hope that I am not being hoodwinked into being unable to differentiate between what is important and what is an irrelevant affront to me as a viewer, a piece of celebrity banality versus mass killing and mass misogyny.  John Gray said,

“We have a system of beliefs that is so successful we don’t understand that it’s belief any more. We think of it as knowledge.”

And that seems to me, Dear Friends, to be the crux of the problem. We want and need the facts but we also need them to be important. We also need information to be reliably verified, to have its foundations so tested so as to remove all doubt. We need our perspectives to continue to understand what is unacceptable so that atrocities never ever become a norm.

“A fish only recognises water when it discovers air”. Marshall McLuhan

It is to be hoped that we never take the images of the ravages of war that appear daily on our screens as simply old news or worse, normal. McLuhan also said:-

“When a conduct is normalised by a dominant cultural environment it becomes invisible.”

And that, Dear Reader, would be terribly wrong. I resolve to be more careful in future before I dismiss a prophet, particularly when the predictor is basing her work on years of scientific detailed research or historical precedents. There have been far too many recent Cassandras out in the world who have been proved right and I am truly sorry that I, for one, passed over them with nary a second glance. I resolve that second glances will be a part of my being from now on. A la prochaine, mes amis.