SQUARE PEGS.....

Don't.....






What is it about panic? Why do we seem to need to do it at every possible opportunity?
The notion of something happening that's going to affect the day to day continuation of everything is always going to bring out strong emotions from one area of the public or other, so when it's rumoured that fuel supplies are going to be in short supply  due to  impending  industrial action by those charged with supplying us, the notion of "Keep calm and carry on" just pus sticks and leaves Dodge .


I'm never sure if it's a national or indeed an international thing but the reaction to almost every rumour or any threat to the normal running of the whole show  is , well, panic.
Is it something we need to do? Something we just can't be human without. Do we,as creatures, have to have something to worry about?  Did my distant ancestor, sitting in his animal pelts, suddenly think one day "Shit, that's a big wall of ice moving really slowly towards me I better panic about it" or did he just work his way around the coming change it would bring?


It's easy to suspect that we may have lost something somewhere, some part of our coping mechanism that enables us to just think about it and decide to do something else rather than sit in our little metal boxes and join a line of slow panic. That's it though, we can't can we. We have to do this because we have no other way of being any more, cogs and wheels in the great big machine of the system that's slowly bleeding us dry. It's just not an option for us to say if it comes to not getting to work on time,or at all, then that's kind of the end of it. Everything is geared  towards us panicking. I myself found that I'd inadvertently joined a queue for petrol after turning in to the nearest Sainsbury's after work. Instantly I thought "I don't want to be queuing, I don't want to, I don't need to. All these people walking past now will think I'm one of those panic buyers aaarrrggghh"!  

There are many reasons why our reaction to things are the way they are. The obvious one is media coverage which  , for the main part , seems to enhance any situation like this in a totally unhelpful way. I don't think this is a new thing, it's just  more accessible in so many varied ways now. Years ago, people had to wait to find things out, now it's instant and  always updating, bombarding us with information and images we can't really process.  Too many pictures to see the big one.People have access to at least the rumour of a story before they know what it is or what to make of it.


 Possibly, the biggest influence on our reactions at the moment is what's happening around us on an economic and political scale. Along with the threats of strike ,redundancy, the demise of The Western World and all other possible unhappy endings, we have people in charge that just don't seem to get it, any of it. The men in suits seem to want to carry regardless of how it makes them look, doing the same old things and reacting to the challenges of government in the same old ways . For me, there's no one definite example of their misjudging of  life in modern Britain, except the"advice" one of them gave earlier this week about preparing for said fuel shortages by "Storing a jerry can of petrol in your garage". Top marks to the fellow  for assuming everyone in the country has a garage to store petrol in and for using the words "jerry can". I believe the last time I actually saw a jerry can was on the History Channel a couple of nights ago, on the back of a Jeep that was full of Americans who had just landed in Normandy. How I wish he 'd gone the whole hog and said "Get your driver to fill it next time he fills the Jag up " . The rest of their tomfoolery  is mainly based around attempts to show their understanding of the every day man and woman on the street by pretending to have even been near any form of hot pastry based fast food ,let alone eaten it, when they've made a fuck up of not really thinking about how to justify the VAT they now want stick on it or allowing themselves to be photographed taking part in activities at one of their childrens' private schools sports days as if it makes them any more a part of the ordinary things they're so obviously aren't.


All in all, it looks as though it's up to us to control our own panic, how we react to the ever increasing nonsense that's coming our way. These things won't stop and no mater who's steering the ship and which fools are crewing it, we will always suffer for their inability to solve our problems on such a large scale and our own expectations that somehow they can.


And if something does happen, remember .....