Another early start saw
me scoffing my frooty-bix cereal and Fudge lapping up his bowl of
milk well before 6am. I got my morning's fix of Babylon 5 and set off
to work.
As I drove I had a wry
smile at the news, and found myself pondering on the way that today's
society assigns blame.
Take for example the
Welsh measles
epidemic. When the fruits of my loin were much smaller we had a
dilemma. Should we give them the MMR vaccine to protect them against
clear and present disease risks? Or should we not give them the
vaccine because of vague unpsecified scaremongering? At the time the
newspapers were rife with stories about how terrible the MMR vaccine
was, and how dangerous it was. We ignored the scare-stories and got
them jabbed. It would seem that at the time the local rag in Swansea
ran a rather impressive campaign against the MMR vaccine and a
generation grew up in south Wales un-immunised.
History has shown that we
made the right decision. The residents of Swansea have all have found
out that there is far more to measles than a few spots. The news
pundits were saying that because the scare stories were so long ago
no blame can now be assigned to the local newspaper. I found this
rather odd - celebrities now in their eighties are being hounded
about allegations of what they might or might not have done forty
years ago. Why can't a journalist be held accountable for what they
demonstrably did twenty years ago?
In a classic sign of our
times the senior Welsh health officials being interviewed on the
radio this morning tried to blame it all on the English. Apparently
some Welsh kids mixed with some English kids and caught the disease.
Perhaps I'm being thick (again), but I thought that passing diseases
around each other was what kids do best.
Or consider the recent
HBOS banking collapse. I don't realy understand what happened. I
don't think anyone really foresaw what was going to happen. Whilst it
was terrible, and whilst mistakes probably were made, is looking for
scapegoats really a better way to proceed rather than trying to learn
the lessons of what actually went wrong?
Mind you in both these
cases I suppose it's easier to assign blame to someone than to try to
make sense of something which is probably beyond most people's
understanding. An obvious scapegoat is always useful to have. And
it's also interesting that the media are in no way held accountable
for the consequences of their actions.
Meanwhile my dog is
incredibly quiet and has a very odd smell. I wonder if he's eaten
something he shouldn't have..
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