Yak Yak Yak: Time to reflect

What a year, I mean WHAT a year! It would be hard to remember within my three score years a time of such change, such monumentally challenging differences to the way so many of us live or would at least like to live.

Who would have ever thought that the major power in the world would be led by Donald Trump or put another way, who would have believed that the American people would come out and vote him into power? As yet he is only President Elect but already the repercussions of this extraordinary election are being felt as he uses social media to launch his somewhat crackpot ideas into the world.

And there lies another strange anomaly, he uses the worldwide web to launch this ideas and yet at the same time he announces that he wants to shut the internet down so that Isis cannot radicalise American youth. He’s going to call his mate Bill Gates to turn the web off! Well that’s going to happen isn’t it? I think not given that Mr Gates probably earns most of his millions for the internet!

What a mess

Here in the UK we voted to leave Europe. Why? Well I think the majority, and that is what it was, voted for something that had been cloaked in misinformation. Far be it for me to say that we were told lies about the total implications of Brexit, but I suspect that we were never told the whole truth. And given the subsequent legal challenges to Brexit that have emerged I suspect that a lot of decision makers and policy posers were unaware too. What a mess, what a seething mess of stupidity.

The year was also filled with sadness as so many much loved people passed away. It seemed to start with the shocking news that David Bowie had passed away, his illness kept as a tightly guarded secret from the world. From then on celebrities seem to have been passing away on an almost weekly basis, especially from the world of music. There are too many to list here and I would like to pose another argument for not listing them all. This is it.

For every star that died in 2016 countless other people passed away. Not stars perhaps but in the context of their own lives equally loved and equally important to their friends and their families. There are also those people that didn’t just die but were killed. Killed in wars, conflict, acts of terrorism, natural disasters and unnatural disasters too. Innocent lives and not so innocent lives. And children, unfulfilled lives, their potential swept away far too soon. Do we read or see all of these in the news. No, deaths of this kind are too often censored. Let’s mourn them all.