Mr A.N.Muggins Gets Criticized For Thinking Openly About The World's Problems (Without Having A Clear Plan)

     Mr Muggins had once wanted to be a rock star. Now it was the writing bug which had got him, but similarly no avail. He’d make his mark on the world one day they said. Everyone said it, but unless you were already famous it seemed unlikely that anyone except for some kind of superman or superwoman could actually acquire money for writing books these days. You had to be famous for something else first. Time was running out however.

     He had been as good as called a racist in the summer by some old friends he hadn’t seen much for quite a few years. They also seemed to accuse him of moaning about immigration, even though virtually everybody moaned about immigration to some extent (even many of the people who had once been immigrants themselves!) It certainly wasn’t that he wasn’t entirely sympathetic to all of the immigrants, or at least most of them, but like many he did wonder whether it might be better if some effort was made internationally to allow them to reclaim their native homes and nations for decency and tolerance and economic prosperity, instead of expecting them to come all this way at great risk to themselves and their families, for a life which would be hard work and probably on the bottom rungs of society, and having to learn new languages and avoid being bullied by some of the nasty entitled kids (and adults, and managers) that seemed to multiply in this confusing modern society of Britain , or probably anywhere in Europe or the States as well.

24/2/21

      Of course none of it was in the slightest bit true. He had always been friendly to people of all races and religions, trying to find common ground and understanding. He bought his first Stevie Wonder record ‘Songs In The Key Of Life’ back in 1980, only a few years after it came out (in 1976!) and had been a big fan ever since! ( He was however afraid that he would not be able to provide his receipt for it if his accusers wanted to see the proof, as it was quite a few years ago. So how could he possibly be seen as a slavery denier or a racist? It just couldn’t add up and he knew it.

     While quite a lot of his generation had been pogoing around to punk rock, headbanging to the music of longhaired white guys, and swooning over white new romantics, he liked and enjoyed it all, flirting frequently with funk, jazz fusion and disco (and sometimes getting criticised for that!), and listening, and tapping his foot religiously to blues music, and soul and jazz of course.

     He didn’t need some little 16  or 20 or 26 year old of today telling him what he was supposed to have known about the world back in those days long before they were even born, or indeed someone of his own age, who should have known better. Slavery had certainly been mentioned at school, and at University he had even studied some detail about the transatlantic slave trade, long before the recent Black Lives Matter campaigns informed the world about it.

    He even remembered watching a lot of Alex Haley’s ‘Roots’ drama series about the past generations of his own family and the lives of slavery they endured in being captured into slavery in Africa and brought to America to work on the plantations, on TV in the late (nineteen) seventies He supposed that had been a bit of an eye opener even at the time, even though he had previously read about the American Civil War and the American Indian Wars, being interested in historical things like that. So he did actually know about things like slavery and genocide, and ethnic cleansing from an early age (just a few short years before the Black Lives Matter movement revealed it to everyone else in 2020!).

27/11/20 / 22/12/20

    It had surprised him that people who he at least regarded as friends, with an easygoing sense of humour, even if he hadn’t seen them too much over the years, should be the ones to bully him over something as tenuous as unfounded accusations of racism. Probably a lot of it had to do with the fact that he had been incensed by the casual attitude a lot of demonstrators and young people in particular seemed to have towards the historical figures of the nation, many of whom had had statues made of them over the years. Like most people in the country he felt quite deeply that even though many of them might well have been scoundrels by the standards of today’s caring world, they were nonetheless important figures in the development of history, and should at least be remembered for their contribution, good or bad, so that an understanding of the characters that made history could be retained.

    Surely if they were committed anti racists you would have thought they would be against bullying of all kinds. Instead they had committed about the only bit of bullying he had ever experienced in many years, apart from the occasional bit of unsurprising and only to be occasionally (frequently for many modern slaves?) expected bullying from managers at work. Anyway as an adult he didn’t have to put up with that from so called friends. He just wouldn’t bother getting in touch with them any more. Simple solution. He didn’t like bullying and to be fair there had always been a bit of condescension, know it all ness and bullying manner in one or two of them, so he was better off steering clear from now on. He had managed to avoid serious bullying at school, and university, so he did not want it in his life now in his mid fifties.

     Of course Alfred was always putting his foot in it with his thoughts on history generally, so he supposed it was not really surprising that he should come under scrutiny from some people who seemed to see the world, and history more in terms of Black and White, rather than grey, or in terms of Left and Right rather than in terms of more complexity, or even right and wrong!

1/1/21

    The real truth was that he, like many people in this confusing modern world, was quite unsure about how to solve most of the problems of the world. Obvious solutions had sometimes been tried long before, and they had thrown up further twists, and unexpected outcomes, which complicated or destroyed their effectiveness. On so many issues the solutions were not straightforward. Issues such as racism or immigration, which were separate, but sometimes related, never went away, and were never completely solved, although great achievements to help the victims in each issue, were often made, and had been made over the years.

    There were always new waves of immigrants or refugees for many reasons. There were always new reasons for people to become refugees, to need to be migrants. No one, from left or right or in between ever had that perfect solution. There was always some mad dictator, or oppressive system, or intolerant religious autocracy, or just plain economic unfairness or capitalism, (plutocracy?), causing poverty, war, or destitution, driving people to flee from the places they should have belonged.

    If he knew what the answer really was to some of these issues he might have fought a bit more, but like many people he felt the answers were not clear. Like many he would have to watch, and analyse, and think, and keep an open mind. He would listen to the suggestions and prescriptions from left right and centre and try to understand where the different viewpoints were coming from. It certainly would not do to make up his mind in a simple way to only support and appreciate one particular manifesto over all the others, regardless of where all the others were coming from. After all politics was the art of the possible, and of compromise and alliance, not of telling everybody else what to think, and then forcing them to think it or at least to agree to pretend to think it and vote for it.