And another thing! I have tried very hard not to swear on here but WTF!? £1.65billion in football transfer fees. O.K. It’s a free market blah blah blah.
At the same time the government is using cuts in its new Disability Benefits regime to remove Motability vehicles from Paralympians.
Both are groups of elite athletes. However, the free market only applies to one group. Is the obscenity of the wage bill for a Premiership football squad ever justified? For those who buy the tickets to watch them? For those that can’t afford the ticket price? Or the replica shirt?
There is so much that is positive that can come from sport, at all levels, but there is also the clearest divide between the have and the have-nots. And a demonstration of exactly how divisive extreme wealth can be. It creates false gods, false aspirations and resignation to non-achievement in equal measures.
And I know that salaries paid to professional footballers has nothing to do with an austerity government cutting wherever they can, even when national heroes and heroines are involved. And yet it does.
Because there is a pervasive attitude of ‘money is all’. Community, compassion, consideration, fairness. They exist, even in our fractured society. But they fight against the more powerful extremes of selfishness, greed, ‘me first’, and a divide getting ever wider.
And it doesn’t just effect this society, this country. As evidenced by the idiocy of the Brexit vote, it will bleed across borders, and prove that a country, or a good proportion of it, can put themselves before the wider good, accepting the bullshit of self-satisfied bigots, who will not suffer because they are financially secure no matter what.
And before anyone says that the problems of the rest of the world are not down to us, read your history and see which ‘democratic’, ‘free-market’ countries carved up the globe to their own benefit, and continue to influence by direct and indirect means, the maintenance of that market, at the expense of freedom, justice, equality and the sanctity of life.
I am tired of feeling angry and disappointed by our continual inability to see beyond ourselves, but I will keep ranting.
And will celebrate every small, defiant flame of compassion lit by extraordinary ordinary people.
cherokoffdotcom 