Sexism

This has been sparked by an article of no consequence, bemoaning the lack of Catholic woman priests. That is just the entry point and otherwise not significant. It is just that it bought my mind around to considering sexism. A few years back, starting with and as a celebration of my Mothers ninetieth birthday, I began charting my family history. Knowing nothing of my father, who left home when I was around 8years, naturally I explored my mothers side. Got engrossed and, with bit now fully between the teeth, explored all provable connections on my mothers line, proud of the links and lineage discovered. In reaching back to the tenuously discernible 1730's I began to consider and explore the social history that led to some key changes in my families histories. Farmers do not become labourers nor end up in a workshop to die of 'insanity', ( as alcoholism was known), without due cause. Cutting a long introduction short I eventually after a couple of serendipity moments, stumbled on an entry point and began to unravel my fathers family. Only to discover I was repeating the steps he too had taken some twenty years earlier. Nothing new under the sun.

I was pulled up short on more than one occasion by relatives who dismissed the maternal line as not having any significance. To them, it was only the male line of inheritance that had any relevance. With my background this puzzled me but slowly other pieces of jigsaw have begun to fall into place. 

We are now, here , this is where it is at, but we are only a continuum of our past. We have to keep our past in view to understand where our future lies. The way forward has to be shaped and based on the path taken to reach this point. All very laboured but let us not forget, male inheritance has been the dominate consideration. Up until this point, the now. Inheritance is simply the passing on of the title to land. Land equates to wealth, privileged, influence and power. Your position utterly depended on what land you inherited and the wheels and deals you could use it for to expand it or prevent others from taking it from you. The by far greatest wheeling deal in town was who you could get to marry you, bringing in privileges, connections or simply more land, not for love or romance but plain pragmatics. Hopefully a woman who could bear strong sons, strong enough to survive childhood. That she was compliant, frugal or even attractive were very secondary considerations. Lets us roll back the years even further. To get land and hold on to it, you had to be a strong fighter able to attract other men to fight by your side and defer to your authority. As top dog, women you could take and have a plenty but you needed one who would bear you a son and nurture it whilst you were away defending you claim to land against all others. Nurture it and stay loyal to you and you alone. A son that you could pass your battle won respect (titles) and land to to survive after your death and making your fights, battles and inevitable death in battle worth while. It does not justify it, but with so much emphasis on the brute force of the macho man, it is understandable that women were regulated. Regulated to a secondary role even to the point that they were legally chattels to be placed, controlled and futures decided at the whim of their lord and master.

Fast forward to today's now. Gender equality rules. The girl, should she choose to marry, may or may not take the male name. Maybe the continental practise of hyphenating the two families lines names into one surname, one from the father and one from the mother, would make good sense. But then which name is to come first, not as on the continent, the fathers name first, that would be sexist. Alphabetical order? And then are both lines to be given equal weight and standing in the family tree? I can avow that the family tree very quickly becomes very diffuse and difficult to read. Starting with four parents, with eight grandparents, sixteen great grandparents and so on. This does probably reflect our genetic inheritance. Very clearly we, as an individual, are a meld of our two parents and through them it is possible to discern genetic characteristics passed from the grandparents. There are some genetic features that are so dominate and survive through several generations even stretching back into the mists of time. We should not be too dismissive of genetic traits. Science has yet to declare whether one sex or other inherits more from one parent or the other, probably not.

My desire to know where I have come from, whose dominate trait do I have that gives me the flair or flaw I struggle to cope with does not justify selecting a male or a female line as my line. To select both is too unwieldy, too diffuse, too many branches that could or could not be significant or worse arbitrary. To make sense you have to follow back along one line of parents but unless we all follow the same rules chaos ensues. Is the need to know and acknowledge our direct line of inheritance more important than this, probably, transitory fashion of gender indeterminacy? It matters to me. I have to know whether I am my fathers son. It matters to those few where the chance of inheriting the stately pile or crown depends on it. To the rest of the world? Just a blip in our ever evolving story of personkinds development and ultimate extinction.

Public or Private?

With the drive to privatise government quangos the vision has occurred to me of Serco or Centrica taking over the running English Heritage or the National Trust. Why not? I am sure they will run a lean tight organisation and would make pots of money out of it in the process. Far better than pour pots of taxpayers money down the bottomless drain. Government would then be free to concentrate on the important cabbages and king questions. Trouble is, just as with the NHS, when a government takes on accountability for providing a service to its citizens it cannot cherry pick and just do those nice easy profitable parts. The NHS ends up with all the knotty, difficult and inordinately expensive investigations and routines that the private sectors excludes out their policies and walks away from.

It easy to imagine honey spots of our countryside or highly popular stately homes, where the private sector would die to get their hands on them, to cream off some serious profits. That leaves all those scattered equally important but small or unspectacular visit places no one wants to go to, or where there are mountains of restoration to hold back decay or work to make available for visitors. Just those sort of places where profit orientated companies would run a mile from. As far as I know there are no plans to change the status of the National Trust nor English Heritage. My objective in raising this hare is that it exemplifies a breakpoint between functions that serve the nation and those functions which can or should be profit driven. The nations needs are not constrained to only profitable operations. Profit driven companies are not suited to providing needs where profit return cannot be the overriding judgement. For the record I do think its was a catastrophic mistake to sell off water, electricity and telephone. These are vital infrastructures necessary to sustain our nations progress, irrespective of cost or return. The sale of coal and postal services is fully justifiable as they are no longer mainstream to development. Equally ensuring a extensive high speed broadband backbone to cover the country is a crucial investment into our future. If left driven solely by profit, it may not be a fastest enough path nor ensure the widest covered.

We have to care for and invest in our Nation for our own wellbeing but also to give future generations as firm a start footing as we have inherited from the past. Which loops me back to my earlier post, Right to Plunder. We are but custodian of our Nation with a duty and obligation to nurture it and hand it on to future generations in a good viable state. Despite the strong armed bully boys who took whatever spoils they wanted, subjugated us to their will and tithed us on our labours. The Nation is ours, formed out of the sweat and toil of our forebears, cared, loved, protected and died for by succeeding generations. This is our inheritance and the inheritance we offer on to succeeding generations. Time to put our inheritance on a more secure and long term stable basis. No longer subject to the whims and fancies of monarch, or the titled, or those who would claim it and exploit as if it was their own.

Radical yes. For a start let us forgo on freehold. No one can own our Nation. Lease on a use, repair and return basis sure but in the end it returns to all of us. No more crown property, it was stolen from the people and now is the time to return it to the people. We all own the regal trinkets of wealth acquired out of our past endeavours and held as fiscal bounty. Not of course as individuals, not to be squandered but just as custodians. With a duty of care and protection. A duty exercised on all of our behalf's and well beyond the reach of government to mortgage against as cover to their extravagances. A custodianship that encourages us to connect with, participate in and take pride in, our mutual ownership. As in my Right of Plunder, nothing to be taken away unless restoration or compensation paid in full upfront. The land, the sea, the structures placed on it and the rights to run service on or under it, eventually all to return to us to pass on in turn to our successors.

That extra mile

Keep circling back to the same topic, so I suppose must be kind of important to get a good steer on it. When is reward enough and more is obscene and socially divisive? See also my Tax, Salaries and Rewards and Higher Aspirations.This is the core question nagging at me. To better your lot is the principle drive that makes people go that extra mile to achieve the extraordinary. We all benefit hugely from all those around us striving beyond the norms to achieve. We want and need them to do it. Maybe even our best athletes are not just seeing how far they can push their skills, to find their own limits. More than likely the distant prospect of fame, notoriety and possible rewards to come are the spur on those so long cold dark mornings when every fibres protests, stay in bed. Switch athlete for skill or expertise, there is in each of us that internal desire to see just how good we can become or far we can go. Excellent. Just not sufficient justification on its own, it needs that added bolster. Fame, recognition and then the dosh that might follow. Reward of an achievement reached is not enough. Fame absolutely, or at least the attention it brings. Without the bonus of creature comforts? Most cases, not.

What we all want is release from the worry of survival from day to period, we want our progeny to have as good or better start and we want to provide for our kin. Good and wholesome aspirations. Incentives enough to push on and try harder. Proper just reward for making that extra effort, to stand out above the crowd of wannabes. But how much reward is adequate and when is it over the top? Enough to have and enjoy a relaxed none caring lifestyle through to your final days. Spared from the haunting, will I, can I afford relief from discomfort, pain, lack of care and nurture. Sufficient so that comparisons to equal or comparable peers is not unfavourable to you. There is a rub, of course we have a predilection to compare ourselves much beyond our actual modest achievements. There is this built in escalator here to be resisted. Lets assume our peers operate a 'higher or lower' wall to approve or contest comparison claims. Next of course we need enough to ensure our progeny receive the benefits of all our hard efforts. Somewhere along the line of a good home, nice clothes, private education, mind-expanding holidays and leisure, connection to similar influential families, protection from the costs of education, helping hand to set up a home and positive introductions to potential employers or clients, somewhere we pass from fair and reasonable to the inequitable. Where your hard efforts so set up your descendants so that, without any effort on their behalf, they can coast on your successes to the detriment of other aspirants.

Inheritance tax is both the final insult and a social leveller. After a lifetime of hard taxed effort the State seeks to take away any residual value. By doing so it reduces your descendants to well off but not excessively so. With the sting in the tale. Why bother in the first place to put money into permanency when none of your kin will get to benefit? If you follow the logic, might just as well paper over with polyfilla and save yourself the time, cost and effort. Then the Nation loses out, instead of accumulating treasures from the past, it gains just puddles of decomposing goo. No, providing we can keep a lid on excessive rewards, then, on past evidence, the second generations will squander their inheritance and in doing so provide opportunities for upcomers to profit from them. Keeping a lid on excessive rewards is the key. Enough to make the extra effort worth while but not so much as to distort the social fabric and threaten the underlying goodwill of all, to see success rewarded.

Finally, having exploited the benefits of living within our society and utilising it as their base to make their fortunes, when the rich complain as the State takes back or regulates the excesses of rewards accruing, they have a stark choice. Either turn their backs on the society that nurtured them on their road to success or accept that this is the price demanded from all those other tolerant people also wanting a chance to make the big time. The makings of a fair and equitable society.