Mail Online

The world’s gone stark raving mad!

DEAR BEL,

OH PLEASE will you help me to understand the world I am living in at the moment? I’m no longer young — not really, except in spirit. But how do you cope when the world drives you mad? It’s a serious question.

I open a newspaper to read that John Allan, former president of the CBI, complimented a mid-ranking CBI manager on her dress.

She complained to her boss, who passed the complaint to the directorgeneral, Dame Carolyn Fairbairn, who viewed it as ‘wholly inappropriate, demeaning and objectifying.’ What!?

Mr Allan is said to have felt ‘mortified’ and apologised to the woman involved. His words have been called, ‘stupid, awful, insensitive and insulting’ and he was decried as being ‘of a certain generation and one of those people who sadly just didn’t quite get it.’ Surely he just wanted to say something nice?

Then I read that the Labour MP Stella Creasy was under investigation from social services. Apparently, some troll had reported her because he didn’t agree with her political views, felt this would harm her children and that they should be taken from her. What!?

Instead of her local council just dismissing this person, she was the subject of a safe-guarding review and the ‘complaint’ will be on her record for ever.

Please Bel, tell me I haven’t fallen down some rabbit hole. What with male-bodied trans people winning races competing as women and depriving female competitors of huge sums of money, I seem to feel angry every day, and just don’t understand how the world has changed. It gets me down. How to cope? LEE

Ilove the fact you’re asking me when I have the same problem! A friend once suggested I solve it by not reading a daily newspaper, but I pointed out that since I (a) love and (b) contribute to the Daily Mail, that is an impossible ask.

Nevertheless there are days when you wonder if you are tumbling down into an Alice in Wonderland burrow where the Mad Hatter says: ‘If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn’t.’

Thinking of your point about sport, that sounds horribly familiar — just like the White Queen’s statement: ‘Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’

As you say, coping with a world which has changed at a dizzying speed does become a problem for older people. But it does for many younger people, too — the less noisy ones who are starting to object to the fact an aggressive minority of activists set the agenda in schools, universities and institutions, and achieve this by intimidating all voices of sanity.

of course, much of this is due to the influence of social media, which we’re stuck with. The world was so much easier and more pleasant without it. People take offence at the slightest thing, don’t they? (I call them the ‘huffended’.) We can’t know the precise circumstances of the case you mention because so much depends on tone and expression, but in theory I agree with you.

Personally, I love being paid compliments and rather wistfully remember being flirted with. Back then we didn’t get our knickers in a twist about everything. We were confident, robust, tolerant free-thinkers who also knew how to have a lot of fun, too.

But we have to deal with the world as it is. otherwise you can end up in a permanent state of frustration and rage.

Your uncut email offered one way to cope, since its overall tone was lighthearted. like Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, you seem to be saying, ‘lord, what fools these mortals be.’ Making fun of fashionable wokeries is one way of coping.

Another way is to realise that nothing lasts for ever. Fads and fancies come and go, yet core values do stay the same.

Here today, gone tomorrow politicians, social media nasties, shrieking students thinking the world is interested in their idiotic pronoun obsession — all of them fade to nothingness besides the things we truly value, like friends and family.

We have to chill out and remember the world has not gone mad, it’s just that there are just a lot of nutcases on the loose. So try to relax…Mind you, since I value King, country, Christianity, conservatism (small c) and sound common sense, I’ll continue to rant as often as I can!

Fighting Cancel Culture

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2023-05-27T07:00:00.0000000Z

2023-05-27T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://mailonline.pressreader.com/article/282312504444270

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