We all need some optimism just now
SOCIAL distancing has been fundamental to the fight against the Covid pandemic and with the variously phased returns to normality at work and at leisure this still applies. Despite a very few high-profile failures and others involving bigger-scale breaches by members of the general public on beaches etc, the necessity of social distancing is broadly accepted.
It is also, however, still of necessity to ensure that social distancing does remain respected during this period of phased normalisation.
The workplace is particularly vulnerable, the leisure situation less so because people usually choose their leisure, whereas work is often a have-to more than a want-to. And for such a reason it is vital that workplaces are seen to respect social distancing, or as perhaps it should be called, “work distancing”.
In this regard it would be reassuring to all employees that workplaces are subject to regular distancing inspections and that prosecutions of violations be implemented.
Teachers have been justifiably concerned for their safety at the resumption of schooling and too many reports have surfaced in the media about people at work having both their physical and mental health imperilled because of lax application of distancing. We have all seen how NHS employees have had to brave the various laxities that have threatened their wellbeing at work.Such issues of health and wellbeing are fundamental in the fight against the Covid pandemic and deserve enforcement by law as their guarantor.
If ever the words of the poet John Donne were applicable it is now: “Everyman’s death diminishes me, For I am involved in mankind. Therefor, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.”
Ian Johnstone Peterhead
YOUR brilliant Big Read last Sunday was such an inspiring and positive piece that I felt I had to respond.
Clearly with Covid-19 and the lockdown, on top of years of austerity and the horror of climate change, we are all struggling to make sense of it. Your optimistic writing is exactly what I think we all need – to try to focus on what all these major disruptions to our way of living is telling us, and what all of us can do to plan for a better future.
I am a retired professional youth and community worker with 50 years of frontline youth work behind me, and when I saw your thoughts on national service it immediately got me thinking.
I, like you, would not want a national armed services sort of programme but something more like community service, which has been done in other countries. What I would call youth work, working with teenagers, is all but completely decimated from years of funding cuts and fear by youth workers and others of teenagers. What is now delivered is children’s work with a youth agenda that is totally inappropriate for teenagers today. The uniformed organisations like Scouts, Guides etc are still providing a very good service to a certain section of our society.
At the end of the 1970s, Scotland saw the development of Young Scot, a youth information-led approach to youth work. It came out of the Government’s Youth Opportunity Progamme (YOP), which provided funds to employers to take on teenagers and introduce them to the world of work.
Young Scot took on 20 of these young people and set them the task of empowering themselves and young people through a youth information service that would address the information needs of teens and support those who sought information on any topic, to turn that information into action. At the end of the first year, the first Young Scot book was published and delivered to every secondary schoolaged teen across the land. It also was available to other teens no longer at school.
The team of 20 young people who researched and published the Young Scot book got such empowerment themselves from their activity that all of them left the YOP scheme with either a job, further education and training, or an opportunity to travel or do something they dreamed off, like setting up a business, recording music or volunteering.
The success of launching Young Scot led to the creation of the Youth Enquiry Service (YES) which I headed up for Strathclyde. It delivered youth information cafes run by young people for young people across Scotland. They became a hub for harnessing the energy, the ideas and dreams of teens across the land. National awards were given to YES for innovative approaches to health education on alcohol, smoking, drugs and sex with the advent of Aids. A whole book could be written on the success stories of lives of teens transformed by empowering them. The Scottish Youth Parliament was but one of these achievements.
This successful innovative project then led to the creation of similar projects in all European countries. Max Cruickshank Glasgow