The Twilight of the Age of Aquarius

I am approaching the very end of a much needed holiday away from nest building duties: more of a sabbatical I suppose; a break from everything I do day-to-day and because of that, I am writing this on the tatty flyleaf of a battered paperback with a borrowed pencil.  It was my intention to retire from literary moaning for the entire seven days of my purdah in the sun and so I brought neither pen nor paper with me, but I now find myself driven to unload for one very specific reason.  You see, whilst watching what passes for the world around here, it has suddenly occurred to me how very much it appears to have changed of late.  It feels a much harsher place.  It is as if the entire planet has swallowed the ‘America First’ mantra and spewed it back out as ‘No, me first’.  People have retreated into little bubble-sanctuaries outside of which nobody else exists.  They cannot have needs or wishes because they are not there.  There is nothing outside the bubble.

People no longer defer to those who were first in line, whose needs are greater; they do not pause to help those who clearly need assistance, they simply push to the front and get what they want.  If they meet somebody else playing the same game, they simply puff their cheeks and stand their ground.  This is the world as a buffet restaurant.

I have long been dismayed by the behaviours displayed in holiday hotel restaurants, but My God! it has got so much worse of late.  And I’m not even thinking about the double-dipping, single-serving-spoon, finger-sucking, food returning, backward queuing, pushing morons who have always been there.  I am talking about the new breed who stalk the dining room looking for nothing more than confrontation and…

…right!  I am currently poolside and I have just witnessed a bone-headed TFW* knock over an entire table containing drinks – not deliberately I think – yet, instead of apologising he merely stared at the people to whom the drinks belonged, sucked his teeth and walked away leaving mum, dad and two extremely shocked kids to – quite literally – pick up the pieces.  Now THAT is what I am talking about…

…At the risk of sounding pompous I think that I must make it clear that this is a five-star joint and it really doesn’t seem to matter.  The attitude has become universal.  We went Whale Watching yesterday (magnificent and life-affirming as it turned out – although not so much for the thirty percent of the passengers who spent most of the trip staring at their last meal swilling around the bottom of plastic bag) on a boat containing, I would estimate, probably fifty people.  One family arrived late, pushed to the front and sat down peaceably enough until the action started, when they stood en-masse and completely blocked the view of everyone behind them.  They were asked to sit down in a variety of languages – including their own – by both passengers and crew, but they blithely refused to do so.  (I will not, in the cause of fairness, divulge the nationality of the errant clan, except to say that they have a particularly poor record on the World War front.)  The captain managed very skilfully to guide the boat sideways towards the whales, giving half of the boat at a time a direct view and, on one particularly joyous occasion, ensuring that the Family Neanderthal missed the action altogether, so by and large the situation was dealt with, but my point is that it shouldn’t have needed to be.

I have been in similar situations a million times and the ignorant or inadvertent ‘blocking’ issue has always been resolved with ‘a quiet word’ from somebody (preferably bigger).  This family arrived on the boat with the clear intention of doing exactly what they did and no amount of implication was going to stop them doing it.  This is the brave new world of Looking After Number One.  This is a world in which the powerful get exactly what they want without any thought of duty to help the weak along the way.  This is what happens when megalomaniac idiots take the reins.  It becomes a message without nuance.  A world in which First becomes First, Last and Only.

And of course, leaders do just that; they lead and where they lead then others – including other leaders – must follow and for many of them the answer to arrogance is arrogance.  The fight to be the most obnoxious is upon us and “Have you met my cousin Big Kevin?  It might not be an IBM he’s carrying, but the baseball bat is remarkably effective in his hands.”  The world feels far less compassionate: “Of course I’d like to help, but what’s in it for me?”  I do understand how society works: power breeds contempt, but it is usually accompanied by some lip-service to responsibility at least.  It is nobody else’s problem, it is an issue for us all: simply the way things are going.  Almost certainly we in the UK, along with France, Germany, Spain and Italy et al. will elect our own Donald-U-Like leaders over the next few years and the dance will go on.

The Age of Aquarius (community spirit, working together and addressing global challenges with a sense of shared responsibility) was expected to last just over two thousand years, but it seems to have packed its bags and buggered off almost two millennia early.  Peace and Harmony has abandoned ship.  This is becoming the Age of Everyone for Themselves which almost certainly will not become a song to sing with your top off.

Tomorrow we go to the airport – the very epicentre of the Me First Universe – the flight home and the airplane – the only environment in the entire world where everybody loathes everybody else, or at least it used to be: I have a very uneasy feeling that the whole world is suddenly becoming an aeroplane…

*Tattooed fuck-wit – with eternal thanks to Billy Connolly