Fly tipping

I often despair about the increasingly regulated country we live in. People say we’re becoming a Nanny State and they’re right…

For some reason I was thinking about Gypsies and Mendicants around the turn of the last century this morning (I have absolutely no idea why), and how it was their choice to travel from place to place, living off the land and following their own rules. And whilst like the former Barbara Cartland, I’m romanticising the whole thing, and Gypsies have always suffered persecution and intolerance I realised, somewhat sadly, that those ideals and that way of life has all but disappeared. Our connection to the land and the seasons is going if not gone.

I think people do need rules and regulations, because the one thing humans have proved time and time again is that the one thing we’re really, really good at is fucking things up. But when is enough, enough? When we have ID cards and our kids are being biometrically scanned to get into schools? When we have pass cards (as in apartheid South Africa) which dictate where we can go and when? When murderers get two years and rapists go free but if you drop litter you’ll get seven years hard labour? When instead of saying no to drugs, we say no to choice? When we totally fear and despise those that choose to live a different lifestyle to what the Daily Mail tells us is the right and proper way to live? When we create and fuel anti-social behaviour by alienating people and depriving them of any meaningful activity and then publicly flog those that, well, cause anti-social behaviour…

And then also this morning I saw why some of that regulation was necessary and I despaired. Fly tipping. Why? What is wrong with these fuck heads? We’ve created a culture that makes us want more and more, so we buy more and more, but then we want more, so we dump what we have and buy something exactly like what we’ve just dumped just a little bit more powerful and a lot more expensive. There’s a disused garage that people just dump crap in front of two streets away from us. In the space of a weekend, a roll of carpet, a broken vacuum cleaner and a headboard have appeared. Because god forbid you would take responsibility and recycle or take them down to the tip? These are the same people incidentally that if they have a dog, will allow it to foul everywhere and then scream blue murder when they step in another dog’s crap…

Here’s my question, why can we never take responsibility? Why can’t we respect our environment and the people we share it with? Why are we only shaken from our apathy (briefly and not until after Coronation Street) when we hear that more regulations are being imposed and we react with indignation and false pride, ‘we are a proud people who are being regulated and ruled into the ground, it’s not right!’ We’re not proud – proud people take responsibility, they see it as a duty to help those less fortunate. Proud people don’t always understand but they always try to listen and tolerate and learn. And proud people understand the need to self-regulate and not take more than they give. Or at least that’s what I thought. In the absence of that civic responsibility, you can perhaps understand why some officious and over-eager MP or councillor decides that what is needed is a big stick and a firm hand.

It's a vicious circle: a few people act like fucktards, regulation is brought but in doing so it acts as a disincentive to people to take personal responsibility for their actions and so a few more people start to behave with no thought or regard (because why should they, they think) and even more regulation is brought in as a consequence...

So you can see, mentally speaking, I’ve had quite a morning of it. And I’m no nearer the answer either. Except that one day – soon – we will be buying a small farm and living a peaceful life working with nature and our neighbours, and frankly the rest of society can go whistle!

I’m going to have a jam doughnut now. And I will recycle the paper bag it came in... unless the jam explodes.