We are living in a time of fear
Our local health Trust has over 70 million to cut from it's budgets at the same time that our Intensive care Unit is being revamped and enlarged....I guess my job ( all 11.5 hours a week of it all) is therefore safe, but who indeed knows just where things will go.
What I am beginning to dislike (in addition to this media hysteria) is that because of the fearfulness of job cuts, people are putting up with bad managerial behaviour and poor HR support, a phenomenon that I am am sure some managers are taking advantage of.
Trade unions ( with perhaps the exception of the RMT(National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers) led by the bullish Bob Crow) remain impotent, so I am sure that some employers, under the guise of recession worries, are taking the opportunity to take advantage....
The media frenzy of reporting bad news is not helped by the creeping sense of doom that pervades tv advertising......every few minutes we see adverts for compensation solicitors (you get 100% of all costs!!!!!!!-they shriek!) offers of money by selling your spare ( spare?) gold jewelry and old mobile phones and there is even an embarrassed Barbara Windsor dressed up as a panto queen plugging the virtues of on line Bingo. (money for nothing?)
sigh....what can we do about all this? well we cannot ignore the economic mess that the country is in, nor should we reject certain cost cutting initiatives but I think there should be a national kind of therapy for everyone in these times of doom, doom and more doom.....
In the old days the Country's monarch would be the centre for some sort of celebration.......( I would love a street party).......and today our communities need something similar, to repair our fragmented and selfish society......Community events are sometimes seen as twee or intensely "middle class" but I think that they are vital in cementing relationships outside the home.......
The older I get, the more I really believe this.