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The Cost of Caring

When you are running in a rat race, it is a rat race, and there is no time to care.

Why has life become a rat race in which leisure is now possibly the biggest industry of all? It does not feel much like a race when you are grid-locked in the rush hour, when you are waiting and waiting at the air terminal for a flight into leisure; you need to be good at queuing, very patiently, to run in this rat race.

You will be told it is because planet Earth is now hopelessly overcrowded, especially England. That there is no room anywhere else and they swarm in here as illegal immigrants. Overcrowding, you will be told, is making life into a race to survive and only the rats will win.

Am I being cynical? - or perhaps I have been reading too many newspapers, or watching too much television. Maybe by watching the rat race for too long I have become a couch potato.

But seriously, I am trying to explain how it has come to pass that we no longer seem to have the time to stand and care.

Not enough money in caring may be part of the answer. A very cynical answer, but the horrible truth is, there is not enough money, full stop. We are all short of money and rich with credit.

That sounds alright until you observe the fact that credit is now the politically correct word for debt.

The pound is issued by private financial institutions as credit.

This is fraud, because credit only becomes money if you accept it as a loan of money. Then by the law of the land, you must find the money to pay interest on the credit, and also find the money to redeem the loan.

The lender who gave you nothing, other than the belief you owed him money, receives as a reward for his sleight of hand, twice the amount of money you imagined you had borrowed.

I will not alarm you further.