Pillory Me.

This ‘tear down statues’ thing has made me re-examine my own past and it’s not pretty. My parents and grandparents worked in Manchester’s cotton mills profiting from the cotton picked by slaves. I myself felt proud to be a Scout leader for a short time, a movement lead by Baden Powell who has been labelled a Nazi sympathiser and racist. My parents were in the war effort under, a long way under, Winston Churchill, a man with dubious family connections. I personally made a lot of money out of American children’s pocket money. And finally I currently buy cloths and many other goods from high street chains made by children in far east sweat shops. Maybe even my pride in being British is misplaced. At least I didn't vote for Brexit and the Conservatives. Yes I’ll miss the bronze reminders of our British past, being able to read the plaque and mutter, “Scum” but in truth it would only be to heap on their heads my own smaller profiteering from those of lesser circumstance. And if I refuse to buy from Primark it will only lower the workers wages, as if they aren’t too low already. In the end I feel I must admit to being born into a species, I suspect the only species that knows the concept of slavery. And of shame, duplicity, usury, nobility and greed without end. These are my ultimate regrets. But then we can cherish, love, laugh, care and create amazing art and science: We’re not all bad. No, the past is always a mucky place just as this present will become in the years ahead, each one to be judged for our human failings and successes. The rich will be pilloried and envied in equal parts, but the past, if erased or cleansed, will not be there to lean from.