Yesterday my daughter and three of her offspring arrived at our house in what I suppose was the mid afternoon but which at this time of year feels like late afternoon. Phil and I had already been for a walk up the road to Dobcross in order to catch some sunshine, but Granddaughter Number Two had promised herself a walk with Grandma (me) and even if it was almost time for the sun to go down she had persuaded her mother to drive here. We stomped round the village in the dusk.
They were accompanied by my older sister’s granddaughter, who regards my daughter as a sort of extra mother, more supportive than her own. As my sister’s granddaughter she is my great niece! Good grief! If she begins to call me Great Auntie Anthea I might have to ban her from visiting.
Anyway, at some point I overheard her and Granddaughter Number Two, both in their early twenties, discussing the various ailments and anxieties their generation suffers from. Why were they the messed-up generation? they wondered. Well, I reflected to myself, technology, mass media, and the fact that their parents’ and grandparents’ generations have messed the world up, and in some cases have tried to make sure that this generation has all sorts of things that we might have liked when we were younger, inadvertently overindulging them in the process.
Here’s a link to an article by a child psychologist on the dangers of smart phones and their effect on young people’s mental health. She tells us that “the majority of children over 10 I see at my NHS clinic now have a smartphone and that “the average UK 12-year-old now spends 29 hours a week – equivalent to a part-time job – on their smartphone”. Rather a frightening amount of time! To think that I find myself feeling a little guilty when my iPad tells me, as it does on a regular basis, that I have spent an average of 2.something hours on this device. And a good part of that is writing my blog, not subjecting myself to insalubrious information.
Its almost certainly too late to put that genie back in the bottle but I have definite qualms about smart technology!
Here, by the way, is Michael Rosen on the subject of qualms:
Tonight I'm thinking about 'qualms'.
I've been in meetings when people have said they had 'qualms' about bringing in 'measures'.
Or they had qualms about expelling someone from school.
'Qualms' are quivers of disquiet
when you feel queasy.
I thought that people would have qualms about Gaza.
I thought that after people agreed how fair it was
to bomb Gaza
there'd be a point when it would all look so bad
they would say, 'I've got qualms'.
Maybe the problem is where can they have qualms?
Where can they say they've got qualms?
If you're Jewish,
then you find that the two main Jewish newspapers
don't have much room for qualms.
Every now and then there's a Rabbi
who has a paragraph or two of qualms
but only after he says that what's going on is understandable
and necessary.
Then, after that, he squeezes in a little qualm.
Most of the time,
the columns are filled with the qualmless.
The no-qualm sort
fighting the good fight from their keyboards.
But where are the qualms?
Are they hiding in cupboards
afraid to come out
in case they'll be accused of being self-hating?
No one wants to be accused of having
self-hating qualms.
After they've explained
how it's all necessary
and it's all the other people's fault,
do they catch sight of the flattened cities
the terrified, scarred and bleeding people?
The tik tok films of laughing soldiers
grabbing the innards of people's flats, cupboards
and drawers.
Is there then a moment
when they wonder, 'Is that what we should be doing?'
(because for years it has always been 'we').
But then, perhaps
the qualm is put back in the cupboard,
and reassurance comes
when someone says that it only looks bad
because people who hate us say it's bad.
It's not really bad.
it'll all work out in the end.
It'll all work out in the end.
And here’s an extract from an article by Avi Steinberg in the Jewish Voice for Labour, a writer who has acted on bis qualms:
“I renounce my Israeli Citizenship: it is a tool of genocide
Thu 2 Jan 2025
As a traditional Jew, I believe the Torah is radical in its contention that Jewish people, or any people, have no right at all to any land, but rather are bound by rigorous ethical responsibilities. Indeed, if the Torah has one single message, it’s that if you oppress the widow and the orphan, if you deal corruptly in government-sanctioned greed and violence, and if you acquire land and wealth at the expense of regular people, you will be cast out by the God of righteousness. The Torah is routinely waved around by land-worshipping nationalists as though it were a deed of ownership, but, if actually read, it is a record of prophetic rebuke against the abuse of state power
The only entity with sovereign rights, according to the Torah, is the God of justice, the God who despises the usurper and the occupier. Zionism has nothing to do with Judaism or Jewish history other than that its leaders have long seen in these deep sources a series of powerfully mobilizing narratives with which to push their colonial agenda — and it is that colonial agenda alone that we must address. The constant efforts to evoke the history of Jewish victimhood in order to justify or to simply distract from the actions of an economic and military powerhouse would be positively laughable if they weren’t so cynically weaponized and deadly.”
Life goes on, stay safe and well, everyone!
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