Personal gods

I had an email from a friend today who read my last posting. He agreed with most of it, but added that most of us have other Gods apart from “the” god (the one who doesn’t exist).

Back in my more gullible “born again” Christian days, we did recognise these other Gods. The chief “gods” were money, food and self. Because these gods were not the true god who we worshipped, we called them false gods. In fact, they are not false at all, and very real.

We have all seen the damage being caused by the worship of money and the current despair that is bringing upon the world. By the way, many people seem to think that the Bible says “money is the root of all evil”. Actually it doesn’t. What it actually says is that “THE LOVE of money is the root of all evil”. This puts a completely different slant on things. Money itself is neutral; it can neither be good or evil. Its how we use it that is the problem, as well as what our attitude is towards it. Are you using money to fund gun running to terrorist groups, or making donations to your local children’s hospice? You get my drift............ It also becomes a problem when we forget that money is actually a means to an end, and not the end in itself. Even so, people can be forgiven for hording their filthy lucre in the present crisis.

We see the results all around us of the “sin” of gluttony. Everywhere you look, you see people impersonating hippos. It’s just too easy to put on loads of weight and become a walking marshmallow with all the cheap, but very tasty, junk food which is all around. Obesity is one of the biggest killers at work in the west today, and kills far more people than, road accidents, wars, acts of terrorism etc…..It also seems so wrong to be switching on the television and seeing so many programmes devoted to food while there are so many people dying of starvation in the world. When I was a child at school, fat kids got made fun of. I guess the reason was because they were relatively rare as compared to today, and so really stood out. The really fat ones which I remember are now dead. Also, while it is no doubt a good thing to work out at the Gym, if we are going to keep in shape then we must eat sensibly. We are all on a diet; it’s just that rather a lot of us are on the wrong diet. Its also an interesting fact that in order to burn off one ounce of fat, you have to, on average, walk 16 miles, so don’t kid yourself that exercise is the whole answer because it isn’t.

Finally there’s self. Just plain selfishness. We can be selfish in many ways, some obvious, and some not so obvious. I am not really bothered about the selfishness which wants to improve one’s lot in life. We all have to have a degree of selfishness in order to survive; otherwise everyone just walks all over us. The kind of selfishness which I find so heinous is the kind where other people are just not considered. Where people call “a spade a spade” without any regard for the feelings of others. Probably the most extreme example of selfishness in living memory was exemplified in the life of the Chinese Leader, Mao Tse-tung. In order to achieve his own selfish ambitions he caused the deaths of some 75 million of his own countrymen, not to mention personally congratulating Pol Pot after the "Year Zero" killing fields massacres and enslaving a whole nation. Indeed, Mao's personal philosophy was that no one else outside of the self matters. For anyone interested in the life of this tyrant, I recommend Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's book "Mao the Unknown Story" published by Jonathan Cape. In fact, just about all forms of criminal activity spring from selfishness of one kind or another. We all, whether we like it or not, have a duty of care to those around us. It starts in our own immediate families and then spreads outwards to the rest of society – and the world. Am I my brother’s keeper???? – Yes you are, and your sisters' as well.

Go in peace.

Water Water Everywhere

I was interested to see on the news this morning that there is a new initiative to get old people in care homes to drink more water - up to 10 glasses a day! Well, I can see that there is a problem with people not drinking enough and I agree that dehydration is dangerous and can lead to a whole load of health problems.

However, I do wonder if those advocates of this new scheme have really thought this through. Has it not occurred to them that perhaps one of the causes of dehydration in old people is that they can’t hold their water in the first place! It is a well known fact that incontinence is one of the main symptoms of old age. So - you encourage an old incontinent care home resident to drink 10 glasses of water a day. This person is already peeing himself every 20 minutes or so. The next thing you know, his bed linen has to be changed that much more often and he‘s sinking in a sea of pee. When he’s not peeing the bed he’s wetting the Shackleton’s High Back chair so its all nice and soggy and steamy for the next unfortunate inmate. Now, this is only one person I am talking about here out of a whole care home. Multiply this by 60 or so and it doesn’t take long to see there will soon be a huge urinic tidle wave of a problem sweeping through the hitherto peaceful haven where you could previously relax in the morning to the soothing sounds of geriatric lips sucking on their morning toast! Now no one is in their chairs, because they are all queuing to get into the one loo open to the residents, beating wildly on the door with their walking sticks and Zimmer frames.

So, we now have a situation where the bed sheets have to be changed and washed that much more frequently. The furniture has to be thrown out and changed every couple of weeks or so. Building contractors have to be called in to design and build more loos. More staff have to be employed, including a tripling of the cleaning staff rotas to cope with all the puddles of old person’s pee issued by those who didn’t make it to the loo in time.

Actually, its all a big conspiracy. You see, care home owners don’t actually care at all for their inmates. They are in it for the money and nothing else. When was the last time you saw a poor care home owner?? No, my friends, what is going on here is a cunning plan hatched up by these greedy parasites who feed on other people’s misery, to make loads and loads of even more money, while duping everyone that they are really concerned about their residents health. Behind this smokescreen, they will vastly increase the care home fees, already at the level of utter usury, thus swelling their coffers while their inmates have hosepipes shoved down their throats and water forced at gunpoint into their distended stomachs in the name of healthy living.

The truth is, that it is not in the interests of care home owners to have healthy residents. If they were healthy, then they wouldn’t be there in the first place and the owners would be out of business. All the residents really want is to sit staring at each other with a nice warm insipid cup of (diuretic) tea and Songs of Praise blaring from the box as they await their turn to enter the happy hunting grounds.

Gosh, thirsty work this writing lark - I think I need a glass of water!