White Dee

I must draw the line at what I see as tolerable behaviour in my own life.

You see we have to live with other people, we have to find common ground with those we physically live with to enable us to find a place where we can all manage to live alongside one another as happily as possible.

So how can I equate the behaviour of people thrust into my home through the internet and the television with my own life? I teach the younger members of the family decency, boundaries and what is and is not acceptable. Yet thrust into our lives is someone who I could definitely not live alongside and would warn those I live with about, as should they act like her I would not be able to sustain living alongside them.

Yet White Dee as she is now called in the media has ‘lots of money’. Something which people are told they must have to be a winner in society.

A woman said today in the local chemists shop, where conversation is not yet dead, that children could not spell and write anymore because of computers. I informed her that a boy in my own family has just passed 12 GCSE’s, all A or A* with a merit for an extended Maths paper and was fully conversant in four languages. She replied with, well he is an odd one. I thought of all this boys friends and knew what she was saying was wrong, as they also had done remarkably well in their examinations. The trouble is people do not hear of these good children. They do not hear of the backbone of this country, people who do not ask to be mega rich and fight to keep their heads above water and teach their children decency and boundaries. They are not news; they are just the ‘good’ people.

Well do we teach our children to be ‘good’ people or do we teach them to go out and get ‘money’ as it is all that matters, decency, boundaries etc being for the stupid. Yes for the stupid that this country relies on to keep the wheels turning; the stupid who earn normal wages and pay their taxes without demur, as they have no choice in the matter; the stupid who dream of riches but would not expect to gain them at someone else’s expense; the stupid who smile when their wages or hours are cut because they need to put a brave face on for the other people they live with; the stupid who die young because they do not have the ‘money’ to pay for expensive treatments and drugs; yes the stupid who make up most of the people of this country who no one ever highlights in the papers, who you do not see on Jeremy Kyle making exhibitions of themselves or who do not brag about not working and having a 60” television paid for out of the taxes of those stupid people.

We have politicians who allow this to happen. We have politicians who went out and got the ‘money’ but did not appear to care about all those people who had voted for them and put their faith in them. We have politicians who allowed 1,400+ children to suffer sexual abuse in Rotherham because they were too busy getting the ‘money’ and keeping the stupid people voting for them. People who had reached positions of power and do not use that power for the good of all are charlatans and liars who say one thing and do another.

So do we tell our children to become politicians and reap the harvest of public money afloat in this country? Do we tell them they can lie, they can evade the truth and they can do anything they want as long as they bring home the ‘money’. Do we tell them not to work hard for their 60” television but to either become a benefit scrounger or a politician because then the ‘stupid’ people will pay for it for them.

Perhaps I am old fashioned, past my sell by date even, but I still cannot tell my children to lie, to walk over others and to do anything it takes to get ‘money’ because to me there are still things more important than money, decency and holding your head up with your fellow man being just some of them.