Hating the haters.
What has happened to this country? What is going on? We really do seem to be becoming a nation full of some very nasty people and I don't like it. All I am seeing at the moment is story after story, report after report, news item after news item, on social and in mainstream media, of racist and xenophobic attacks and mind-boggling hatred towards our fellow man and woman. It's horrible. Even though it's now been a week since the Referendum, since we voted to leave the European Union, it's going on and on and on. The hatred and racism is not abating in any way that I can see, if anything, it's getting worse. According to newspapers and the news bulletins I've seen, read and heard just today, racist hate-crime has increased fivefold in the last week. A truly terrifying statistic and not a Britain I want any part of. People are being abused just because of where they were born, because of the colour of their skin and it has to stop.
What is going on?
People are being abused, insulted and attacked for no other reason than the fact they were not born in this country. Got a 'funny' name? Go somewhere else. Got an accent? Get out. Born somewhere else? The exit's that way. Got a different skin colour? No room, we're full.
Why?
Anyone with any knowledge or understanding of our country's history knows that Britain is, and always has been, a medley of people and traditions from other countries, other nations, other cultures. A wonderful, amazing, fascinating meld of people from all over the world. People from many races living and working together, over the years, to make our country what it is. People absorbing other cultures and traditions, whilst adding a 'British' spin to everything. People teaching each other about life elsewhere and learning from one another for centuries. That's what has made us the people and the country we are today.
But things are changing and, in my opinion, they are not changing for the better. As a nation we are becoming more and more insular and intolerant of others and it has to stop. All this bitterness and hatred is wrong and cannot go on. Not without harming the health of our country it can't, anyway. Disrespecting, attacking and abusing others has to end before it's too late. I believe that my parents got it right and I believe that we should all try to think the same way. It makes sense to me anyway. They were both children in during the Second World War and the things they saw and heard then taught them something invaluable. Thinking first and then treating other people the way we would like to be treated ourselves needs to become our watchword, the way we all live our lives. Continuing to hate is wrong and can't go on.
When I was a child, back in the 1960s and 70s, my wonderful parents brought me up with one main tenet for my life which they encouraged me to follow. It's a maxim that has served me well for more than half a century now and it's something I have tried to instill into my own children's upbringing. It's something, I believe, we would all do well to remember and try to adhere to, especially now. If I have learnt nothing else, if there's nothing else I could teach my grandchildren, when I am blessed with some, if I take nothing else forward into the rest of my life, from the many things my parents taught me, practically from the day I was born then it's this,
treat other people they way you would like to be treated yourself.
If you don't believe you would like it done to you, by someone else, then don't do it to other people.
Stop, think, reconsider then walk away. That is what we need to remember every day in everything we do and that is what we seem to have forgotten at the moment.