I had a very brief flicker of doubt about my social conscience this afternoon.
I found myself strangely cheered by the thought of an 83 year-old woman falling over in her home and breaking her arm. The old woman in question has dimentia and a history of strokes, but yet the thought of her falling over and breaking her upper arm briefly brought a warm glow and a sense of peace to what was turning out to be a reasonably ordinary day of work, work and work.
“What the fuck is wrong with you!”, I hear you say.
Where could I possibly begin to answer that...
Luckily, in my mind, an imaginary someone helps me to find a possible answer; “Are you some kind of sociopath?”
Possibly... Given the evidence to date, I couldn’t in good faith rule it out...
“She’s just a defenceless and senile old woman in a state of distress. And you find that heartwarming?!?”
Yup! A little. I’m not jumping for joy, but I’m not crying for our damaged society, either.
I could say I don’t feel good about myself for it, but I’d be lying. I don’t feel anything about myself for it. But I still feel... not exactly happy... but certainly content.
“Sick cunt!”
True. But I suppose I should give a bit of context to this before the authorities are called, or you decide you have happened across some strange, niche market, fucked-up blog about geriatric cage-fighting. The old woman in question is not an elderly relative or some kindly old spinster helping out at the local Oxfam. She’s not even a neighbour with deliveries of milk spoiling outside her door while I amuse myself at the thought of her slowly wasting away alone and forgotten by the world she was once a vibrant part of thanks to the wonderful policy of ‘care in the community’.
The old woman in question is Margaret Thatcher.
The news report stated that “she had tripped and fallen at about 0800BST. An ambulance was called and she was transferred under police escort, with her special branch protection detail, to the hospital”. Most of us will never receive anywhere near that kind of special treatment in our dotage, partly thanks to the privitisation of the NHS in the 1980’s, but I presume that Baroness Maggie will be in the best of hands.
So, back to the brief concern for my social conscience. Should I feel bad for her or not? After all, “There is no such thing as 'society', there are individual men and women, and there are families."
I was in primary school when she became the first (and, to date, only) female Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland. My formative years were against a backdrop of New Wave and New Romantics in the charts, big hair and shoulderpads in the streets, and the A-Team and Knight Rider on the rented Rumbelows TV in the living room. My young self knew little of politics in the early 1980’s, but I knew that the bogeyman was real - and her name was ‘Maggie’, ‘The Iron Lady’ or simply ‘Thatcher’. She was the one who stole the milk and caused Santa not to visit my friend’s whose parents were forced out of work from the industry we used to have.
I grew into a teenager through her reign, to a background of social unrest, industrial strife and high unemployment. The attitude of the country was that ‘Greed is Good’ and through monetarist economic policy and economic liberalism, this was reinforced by our country’s leaders until it helped us into the economic crash of the of the late 1980's and recession of the very early 1990’s – all under the rule of that same wandered, frail and injured old lady.
Even years later, long after she had departed from power, when, as an adult, I had to pay my poll tax and student loans, I realised I was still suffering for being one of ‘Maggies children’.
It would be naive and churlish to say any of the current recession and economic crisis is due to Thatcher’s policies, we have had almost 20-years and a succession of governments to right the political wrongs, if not the memory of the fashion wrongs, of the 1980’s. But we don’t appear to be able to learn from history.
Our current Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, Lord Mandelson once claimed of New Labour that “we are all Thatcherites now”, and in terms of economic policy this seems scarily accurate – history has a habit of repeating itself.
In the long term, it will be interesting to see how history remembers Margaret Thatcher. I, like many of my generation, will not remember her fondly. But now there’s an outside chance that one day in the future, once they finally stake her into her casket, I will remember a day way back in 2009 when she did something to bring a smile to my face and a warm feeling to my soul.
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