On being over-sensitive!

I keep finding examples of the hyper-sensitivity of the modern age. Yesterday it was the National Farmers Union declaring that famous folk like Joaquin Phoenix should be careful what they say as their speeches may adversely affect the mental health of struggling farmers. Now this article suggests that we have to be extra careful not to upset children with the bedtime stories we read to them.

Here’s a sample:

“I’m reading one of a small forest’s-worth of beautiful new picture books about the environment with my eight-year-old twins. The Sea, by Miranda Krestovnikoff and Jill Calder, takes us into mangrove swamps and kelp forests and coral reefs. We learn about goblin sharks and vampire squids and a poisonous creature called a nudibranch. Then we reach the final chapter on ocean plastics. When we learn that by 2050 there could be more plastic in the ocean than fish, Esme bursts into inconsolable tears.”

One of the purposes of reading such books with children must surely be to make them more aware of modern problems and to encourage sympathy and empathy. So it’s perfectly right and good that Esme bursts into inconsolable tears. I would be more disturbed if she just shrugged her shoulders and moved on to the next book. After all, not all fairy stories have a happy ever after ending. Well, actually, these days they tend to have been adapted so that they do have a happy ending. But at least there is a trend to try to persuade little girls that the answer to all their problems is not necessary a prince in shining armour.

Having said that, our smallest granddaughter is still buying into the whole princess thing and likes nothing better than to dress up as one of the Disney heroines. And it’s not that she does nothing but girly activities. She is quite likely sit in her princess frock and play with toy cars and a tiny garage. The cars are all given personalities though and at least one is always afraid to go down the ramp. We have been child-watching as we have been out and about.

It’s amazing how many small children are allowed, even encouraged, to make a prodigious amount of noise as they are being pushed along in their baby-carriages. This is especially so in Spain, it seems to me. We witnessed two small girls, in a double buggy, squealing at the top of their lungs, clearly for the sheer delight of squealing. Their mother ignored them altogether. I suppose she may have tried already, without success, to get them to turn down the volume and had just resigned herself to letting them get on with it. But this is how they grow up into the kind of adults who talk over each other in “conversation” round a cafe table.

Then in a cafe after lunch the other day, a child on the upstairs level dropped a toy car. It clattered down to land under a table near ours. He came down to look for it but couldn’t spot it. I told him where it was. He picked up the car and walked away. Neither did his parents acknowledge that I had been a tiny bit useful.Just a simple gracias, that’s all I needed.

Now, here’s an unforeseen, but sadly very foreseeable, consequence of the coronavirus. In the United States, I read, since the outbreak of the illness, the largest and oldest Chinatown in the country has seen a drop in tourism, as a racially tinged fear has appeared to have kept visitors from its streets. There have been no confirmed cases of coronavirus in San Francisco, but even so, Chinatown regulars say the streets are less crowded, and people have begun to worry – not about the virus itself, they said, but on whether their businesses can survive this downturn.

The concern was enough that the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, made a publicized stop this week in her home town’s Chinatown to implore people to “please come and visit and enjoy Chinatown”.

Closer to home, I hear that there have been a few aggressive incidents in Manchester’s Chinatown.

Fear makes baddies of us all, it seems!