Conversations can go in a strange direction. It’s well and good to be sceptical. I mean, questioning newspaper headlines, social media hot shots and politician’s pontifications. Lies are common enough, but everything is not a lie. My experience is that most people are honest, straightforward, and reasonable. So, yes, be sceptical but don’t think everything is a conspiracy. The evidence simply doesn’t point that way.
How did this chat kick-off? Surprise, surprise, a conversation about COVID-19. There’s no doubt that a lot of big mistakes were made in the last few years. Balance that fact with the dedication and hard work people put in to mitigating the pandemic and the suffering of those who lost loved ones. It was a crisis that most of us had never experienced. The pains and shocks were real.
When I hear someone say – it wasn’t a real pandemic, you know. Following up with – do you know who was funding the chaos? That question left me with a blank expression. Then an answer, as if this confident speaker had discovered something no one else knew – it was Bill Gates. Although I’d heard this conspiracy theory before it still left me doing a shocked double-take. How can someone be so convinced of such utter nonsense?
I’m a liberal, so I question those who follow a crowd for the sake of following the crowd. On top of that way of thinking, free speech is to be cherished. If my judgment is that the world of conspiracy theories is not new and is just part a colourful world, am I ignoring the harm that untrue utter nonsense can do? It’s a difficult dilemma. When someone gets sucked into conspiracy thinking they become chained to lies but they freely take-up those chains. Is it harmful for people to buy crystals or silver foil hats to protect themselves from the evils of 5G[1]? It certainly is nutty. Maybe, they have a right to be nutty.
Switching subjects. Thundery skies, dusty, a sweaty 25 degrees C and bright shafts of intense sunlight. Lanes full of cars, bikes, buses, trucks, and vans. The writhing unpleasantness that is the M25 motorway. That’s too mild a word. As the song by Chris Rea goes – The Road to Hell[2]. A song made for the M25 that never grows old.
Yesterday, hell was a bad place to be (Not what AC/DC wrote). Stop and go. Stop and go. It was a self-imposed torture sitting in lines of traffic on the country’s longest moving car park. Moving only as an afterthought. I did the 60 miles between the towns of Reigate and Hatfield. That’s almost 180 degrees around London’s circular motorway. From South to North. If it’s not the noisy concrete sections, then it’s the countless number of congested lanes under the Heathrow flight path that are top of my worst list. Grinding slow, mind numbing and an indictment of our failure to take the environment seriously. Transport policy is in a mess.
What’s crazy is our country’s response to this everyday transport pain. Make it bigger and wider. Carve out more of the countryside and cover it with concrete, steel and tarmac. I’m talking about the current work on the A3/M25 interchange at Wisley[3]. Heavy machinery has dug out trees and shifted massive amounts of soil to shape the land to the demands of the internal combustion engine. Add a lane. Fill up a lane. Add another lane. Fill another lane. Build a bridge but never bridge the gap. That been the way of the last 30-years and more. A monster that just keeps eating up more land.
[1] https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/causes-of-cancer/cancer-myths/do-mobile-phones-cause-cancer
[2] https://youtu.be/OcW-BSEB3ng
[3] https://nationalhighways.co.uk/our-roads/south-east/m25-junction-10/
John Vincent 