Thought for the Week: Hopes for a brighter year
Ken Veitch reflects on moments of insight and good people
It is 16 December 2016, the time when we sing and pray about peace on earth and goodwill to all people. Bashar al-Assad’s forces have gained ‘victory’ in what is left of Aleppo and its people. A riot is taking place at Birmingham Prison. The government is selling billons of pounds worth of weapons to human rights abusers such as Saudi Arabia, which, using British bombs and military personnel, is attacking civilian targets in Yemen.
President-elect Donald Trump, promising to ‘drain the swamp’ in Washington, seems to be filling it with alligators.
Food banks are multiplying, alongside funding cuts to libraries, theatres, orchestras and Sure Start centres for children, while bankers’ bonuses are unaffected. The London borough of Newham has eighty-four betting shops. The understaffed National Health Service, according to insiders, is close to breaking point. No trains are running on Southern Rail. There is the political and economic uncertainty of Brexit.
The bad news seems unending and is supplied largely by a media that, in the words of journalist Polly Toynbee, sees truth as ‘what people can be made to feel it is, stirred by rampant fears and hatred’. There is a growing apathy and erosion of public trust.
So, this seems a good time to recall the words of Jo Cox MP, murdered in her Yorkshire constituency just before the Brexit referendum. She said: ‘While we celebrate our diversity, what surprises me time and time again as I travel around the constituency is that we are far more united and have far more in common with each other than things that divide us.’ Her sister added: ‘We know that there are some evil people in the world, but there are an awful lot of good people too.’
Good people are at work all the time, unsensationally, and their activities are so much less reported. A person local to us has made several long trips to Calais, loaded with toiletries and other comfort items for refugees. After the terrible flooding of homes in Carlisle following Storm Desmond a year ago people were still coming to the local hospice with donations; a large city hotel invited local chefs in to provide free meals for the homeless and laid on a Christmas party with presents. Prior to a big match recently, Sunderland Football Club arranged a penalty shoot-out for a little boy with terminal cancer, who scored, to huge acclaim, against the Chelsea goalkeeper. A former cinema in Newcastle is a clothes bank, bulging with donated items.
What might be a guiding message for New Year 2017? The Bible has plenty of food for thought. My own suggestion is from the writer Alexander McCall Smith. In Bertie Plays the Blues, one of his delightful Scotland Street novels, he writes: ‘Every so often, in a moment of insight that can be very nearly mystical in its intensity, we see others in their real humanity in a way which makes us want to cherish them as joint pilgrims, almost, on a perilous journey.’
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