On Wife Swap last night a Pakistani woman, born here, went to stay with a family in Kent, and the first remark she said when she arrived in the village was "It's not very multicultural!"
I honestly couldn't understand what the significance of that remark was. Is it now a requirement every area of Britain has to be multicultural or it should be corrected or what? If she'd gone to most places 40 years ago she could have said it in every town and village, it never occurred to anyone then. Now If any of us went to Pakistan (where her husband was born and grew up) and went to a village 50 miles outside Karachi and said that they'd probably be in prison now. Or France- 'Oh, I enjoyed the holiday, but the village was, how can I put it, too French?' I've never heard anyone say that either. People make great efforts in Spain to deliberately find areas that are more Spanish than the tourist areas to soak up the full culture, so why does this poor country always get it in the neck?
I nearly fell off my chair when she let that throwaway comment go, and it originated in the prevailing attitude that began mainly in London's people's republic of Camden and spread since the seventies. I used to work in a community centre there and the phrase 'knitting their own muesli' comes to mind...
An equally ignorant and idiotic remark was made by a Talk Sport presenter (I'll save his blushes as he comes from an earlier wartime generation who actually believe this) who said couldn't people with depression ignore it?
This is an apparently educated man in his 60s who's travelled the world and can still seriously come out with that, encouraging others to believe him. If you have a nail in your foot, no one expects you to ignore it. So how are people supposed to ignore other things which are just as painful in other ways? It was only coming up against attitudes like this that forced me to 'come out' over my own anxiety situation and each individual that can be converted from the 'It's not real, you can make it go away of you really try' view to seeing it as just as concrete as a physical problem. I should try giving them a tab of lsd and seeing if they can ignore the visions for very long... But it's a shame that's probably the way any of these guys will realise what it's like, much like those who have never seen a ufo or had a psychic experience and take the piss until it happens to them. Aren't so many humans thick?
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