Walk a Mile in My Shoes

An article on the BBC this weekend caught my eye regarding one American woman’s feeling that she is not liked here due to the fact that she is American : Anti-Americanism ‘feels like racism’. Now while I am neither proud of my countrymen who behave thus nor justifying such behaviour I really think Ms Cox should stop whining for a moment and take a little look around her at a world fractured by resentments and bigotry of every shape and form. How does she think the average Muslim feels right now since her own government managed to conflate a terrorist attack by nineteen terrorists into a clash of civilisations? How does she think the average Hispanic feels as American politicians rail against the immigrant threat? She is a citizen of the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world but yet she expects everyone to love her too? Wake up dear. That wealth, power and opportunity that you enjoy comes at a price and its high time you and your fellow Americans woke-up to the burden that such position entails and that includes not being loved by everyone. Its a fact of life which millions, if not billions have to live with every day.

Even within our sceptred Isle there are regional and social divisions which guarantee hostility for the unfavoured. Only recently there was a piece on Harry’s Place ostensibly complaining about the ridicule foisted upon the hapless Chav and perhaps for a moment I would have agreed to some degree but rather disappointingly the call to arms was nothing more than a call to get back to ripping into The Posh. The hypocrisy of which was lost on the leftist muck-slingers who seem determined to defend the indefensible. Some sense was injected with this comment :

Nothing about mocking chavs makes me uncomfortable. On the contrary, I revel in it, its the revenge of the decent majority of ordinary people on some of the very worst aspects of modern Britain - the total lack of anything resembling culture, wit, manners, respect for others, and any sense of how to behave in a social space. In essence, the chav is the classic lumpenprole, Thatcher’s children, and fascism’s recruiting ground. This has nothing at all to do with being anti-working class; the chav represents the complete antithesis of what the old working class used to be about, with some sense of social solidarity, a trade union consciousness, taking responsibility for oneself and ones family, self-sufficiency, hard graft etc. As you say, only middle-class guardian readers worry that chav mockery - an entirely healthy reaction in the era of Big Brother and other varieties of mass cretinism - is terribly un-PC and anti-working class, revealing a typical deep snobbery against the concept of a real, mature, hard working, grown up and responsible working class. Because, when it comes right down to it, they never have to sit on a bus with the foul mouthed morons. Mock on. - Jack40

The truth is Ms Cox, there is only one way to be loved by everyone and that is to be so achingly average that there is nothing about you to envy or criticise in any way, so be careful what you wish for.