Now I’m not one for commenting on current affairs really. Okay maybe flatulent cows and other environmental disasters, yet politics, terrorism and the like are events that generally I try to ignore in an effort to keep my own personal view that the world is cuddly and fluffy and people are essentially nice, even the ones who think that NLP is a load of old codswallop.
And yet, in recent weeks, it seems to me that what it means to be British has taken some serious beatings. Our society is based on the ideal that certain pillars of society are unfallible. The two that come to mind are Doctors and the BBC. When we need something signed or authorised, in the eyes of our law, you can’t really get better than a Doctor (perhaps a Vicar) as an endorsement of the truthfulness of the information you have placed on whatever the written document is. And yet suddenly the role of Doctor in our society has taken a serious battering with the revelation that even this proud and trustworthy profession has been infiltrated by those seeking to cause harm rather than save lives.
This in isolation is a shock to the foundations of our society, yet we are strong enough to survive such a paradigm shift. Yet when another pillar, that of the BBC, which in my eyes has always stood for fairness, trust and a step above the gutter that is the media in all of its forms, to be revealed as a common fraudster, is perhaps too much for our society to take. I wonder what the long-term repurcussions of these events are, how we can maintain our proud identity in the shadow of such events, and how we can know who to trust in the future?
