Pulling together is not what it once was

WHAT a strange time it is for us all. Certainly, the annual festive vortex which occurs between Christmas and New Year has been a sobering one for the many families who have lost loved ones during 2020.

It would have been my Mum’s birthday on New Year’s Eve, had she not passed away this autumn. She did not contract Covid, but the pandemic cut-short her cancer treatment, so she may have lived a little longer had it not been for virus.

I miss her more than I imagined – but one thing I do know is that Mum would have been marching forth into 2021 with gusto, optimism and fortitude, had she been alive.

A real countrywoman out of the traditional mould, she was one of those glass-half-full rather than halfempty sorts – simply accepting the highs and lows of life, and getting on with her existence with little or no complaint. Which was the way so many of her rural generation were raised.

That is a generalisation, of course, because there would have been countless country folk in days of yore who would have whinged and moaned just like some people do today. But a lot of older readers will know what I’m talking about…

There is an atmosphere of expectation which sometimes pervades today’s society. It’s almost as though we feel we have a “right” (whatever a “right” really is) to the kind of fairly well-feathered lifestyle which, only 75 years ago, would have been regarded as the sole preserve of those fortunate blighters known as “the gentry”.

Even if you look at the way people approach fundamental concepts like free health-care or schooling, you see attitudes of automatic entitlement which sometimes smack more of market-driven consumerism than anything to do with benefits designed for the good of an entire community.

I have been in GP or hospital waiting rooms in recent years where the buzz around me seems to say: “I am a consumer, and therefore I have rights”.

It seems that some people fail to appreciate that a community service means we are all participants. A national health service is provided by the community, for the community – and as such we are part of the machinery that provides it. Yet all too often, to give one unwholesome example, health practitioners are hampered by a fear of litigation.

“Had an operation that didn’t turn out as you’d hoped?” say adverts paid for by greedy lawyers who will sue the living daylights out of a health trust at the drop of a scalpel – hardly the kind of “pulling together” which ex-members of the unworldly Bullingdon Club now populating Whitehall say will keep the nation safe during a pandemic.

And sometimes this “pulling together” seems to have been sadly lacking in 2020. I’m not talking so much about the out-and-out selfishness of some during the pandemic – more the low-level attitudes of many. Take, for example, TV news vox-pops where reporters go into the streets wielding microphones on long poles asking shoppers what they think of the latest Covid restrictions – all too often consumers laden with bulging bags say things like: “They should tighten the rules! And they should have done it before now.”

They might add: “Not that any of it applies to me. I know my rights – and, unless physically prevented, I’ll shop ’til I drop…”

During the first lockdown, I used to sit in my dying Mum’s garden and speak to her through the French windows – and the journey to her house would be along empty roads. People really were staying at home. In the November lockdown, the same roads were busier than August.

Now our area is in Tier Four and the new Covid variant is driving numbers through the roof. And instead of going to see poor old Mum for her birthday, I went to town to pick up essential supplies using the supermarket’s click-and-collect service.

Once again, the main road was bumper-to-bumper and all the supermarket car parks were packed (odd for a sparsely populated area like West Somerset – but then I’m told many local holiday properties are full this weekend).

Strangely, I was the only one using the much safer click-and-collect option – despite being in an area which has one of the oldest and therefore most at-risk populations in all the UK.

So there’s something going on here that I fail to understand. Can it really be the case that our highly individualistic society is reluctant to think or act collectively for the good of the greater community?

Perhaps the modern version of “pulling together” means: “We all know our rights. We have expectations regarding holidays, nice clothes, etc – so we’ll make individual judgement calls over what is safe.”

The UK’s 40-year promotion of individualism has been great in its own way, but it hasn’t worked so well in a pandemic.

Seldom have we entered a New Year with so little idea regarding our future. We know an escape hatch is about to be opened thanks to the vaccine, but whether the pandemic will improve the way in which we collectively cooperate with one another remains to be seen.

Chuck Brexit into the mix and 2021 will – to say the very least – be interesting.