This time Maybe?

Is it me or is something going on? I mean I’ve been wrong before, you know, wishful thinking and stuff. And then this evenings ‘Have I got News for You’ with Conrad Black being ripped to shreds by a thousand barbs, sitting there like Jaba the Hut smirking at all humanity, proof if it were needed he has no blood left to bleed. But that’s just the latest thing. A two year sentence for inhuman care-home workers, a documentary on Donald Trump’s sociopathic inhuman bullying, Jimmy Saville being turned in his year-old grave, and even the BBC genuflecting on its part in their favourite uncle’s fiddling about, as in the Who’s double album, Tommy, that blew me away in ’69. A trader being prosecuted for losing £1.5 billion trying to save the bank that he “love as his family”, a ‘Thinking Aloud’ mental health radio program about thoughtless harassment in the workplace. Then enter Darren Brown as a media suicide bomber, well almost. His premise is to take one individual through the ‘reality’ of Armageddon hoping to show his uncaring drift away from humanity can be reversed. This individual began an average, intelligent couch potato uninterested in the finer points of compassion, heroism and real affection. The program follows his horrific journey courtesy of explosions, gory makeup and actors. It’s difficult to watch because he is not an actor; he’s real like us, affected like we would be, scared, confused and interested in his own survival. He shows little outward emotion, no easily readable facial expressions, no glib lines of dialogue. This is really happening to him. And that’s the end of part 1. So is there a confluence occurring? As we wake and sleep are there creative forces aligning themselves behind some thrust to reinstate humanity? Might the amorphous desires of the flower power sixties be reprising itself in a more structured muscular form? Is woolly liberalism being replaced by the concrete findings of neuroscience, sociology and psychology? Or will it take some real armageddon to wake us up to it? I don’t know, I’ve been wrong before.