“Sorry it’s Company Policy.”

Do you know that helpless hopeless feeling when some nebulous authority says there’s nothing you can do but capitulate? Now history. Back in the 1600’s Europeans invaded the Americas, the homeland of its countless resident Indian tribes. These noble explorers set about carving their future in the face justifiable resistance from the Indian inhabitants. There was a sort of corporate sensibility within the incomers, a feeling of being ‘other’ in this new country. They decided they were superior and the redskins were savages. Only by this trick of branding could the incomers justify their despicable behaviour as good and acceptable efforts to ‘civilise’ them, as opposed to killing and pillaging which would have felt very upsetting. After a hundred years of being brutalised, lied to and corralled the majority of Indians have become demoralised, subdued and constrained into ever diminishing reservations. America is now white and still policing a poverty stricken Indian population ravaged with drug and alcohol problems, and thus justifying this result as, “they brought it on themselves”. But basically they were screwed by the incomer’s ‘company policy.’ Aborigines in Australia, Indians in India, Palestinians in Palestine all screwed by the same branding and conveniently justified by, ‘sorry it’s company policy.’ And African blacks transported, traumatised and sold for the strength of their backs. They also had that same, ‘helpless hopeless feeling when some nebulous authority said there’s nothing you can do but capitulate’ in the face of some foreign governmental ‘company policy.’ Individually we also do it. “I hit her because she was asking for it”, “I did it to teach him a lesson”, “she had it coming” etc, all justifications for actions that would otherwise sully our own rosy view of ourselves. We too can think “they brought it on themself” and conveniently overlook the part we played in causing their perversity. This for me is the root of prejudice. ‘We’ unilaterally made the rules of engagement that ‘they’ must play by. That these rules appear just and fair is no tribute to our justness and fairness but rather our inability to appreciate the difference of others. That we rule by them is the very definition of unfairness, which then produces a perverted history, a mistake in the knitting pattern that at some point must be carefully unpicked and put right; no easy thing when generations are involved, and the generality exists under a mass of individual differences. Are ‘they’ Marcus Rashford, Stormsy or a drug gang member? Are we David Attenborough, Tracy Emmins or a drug gang member? And how many generations have we been in the making? We are all in parts family, opportunity, personal quality and luck, thought the latter is mostly dependant on the former. Families we must foster, opportunities provide, personal qualities must be judged fairly, and trust to luck. And wealth? In these terms it’s immaterial but in terms of its capacity to grossly deform the structure and well being of society it has no equal. It’s the very essence of the, ‘nebulous authority that says there’s nothing you can do but capitulate.’