The Ugly Truth

Ugly truth. No one really cares about you! Well, okay, your kids care and your spouse and maybe your mum and dad and a few close friends. But, at the end of the day they all have their own basket of problems and their own worries and concerns and for the most part they do not go home and start thinking how they can make your life better. What they do is go home and start working on how they can make their life better. The problem is that we as individuals have been brought up in a country (and a fine country may I add) but non the less one where it is frowned upon to think too highly of ones self. The problem is now that we are deep into a recession and if we don’t start thinking for ourselves and about ourselves then who will?

What used to be a quaint and likable thing about the British ‘The slightly self deprecating manor’ that we had has now become out ‘Achilles Heel’ our downfall in a time when we need to be forward thinking.

Let me give you a better example.

☞My Assertion. It is my assertion that there is no Government!

Wait! Don’t leave yet!

When we think that someone else will take care of our troubles and we say "It’s the Governments job!" This is what happens:

Let’s take as an example the Unemployment Office (at least that is what is was called when I was a young boy). For a start if they were thinking positive they would call it the Employment office. So the responsibility of the 'Unemployment Office' is to find us work. The recession has hit hard, you have been made redundant and off you go to the Unemployment Office. The first thing that happens is that you begin to feel as though you did something wrong and you see yourself standing there with many others in the same situation as you, but also with a lot of regulars who you have been propping up with your taxes for the last, how ever many recessions.

So you suck it up and give all of your details to a complete stranger some quite personal and you are asked why you do not have a job? You explain about the recession and cut backs etc and that you are willing to do anything, in order to work. The clerk says they will see what they can do.

The thing that we must accept is;  when the bell goes at the end of that persons working day, they do not take your file home and keep working on it on your behalf. No, they take themselves home, sometimes to a worse situation than the one that you have and they worry about their life and the new job they want. You have now become a number in a computer program which will spit out jobs that may or may not suite you, but the thing is it’s a computer and it does not care. The clerk who you saw today will be inundated by a new group of people in the same situation as you tomorrow and you will be a distant memory.


The problem is that when we think that the Government will take care of (it) we fall foul to an unrealistic expectation of a group of people who work in buildings belonging to the Government. (Well actually, when you think about it the buildings belong to us). The only responsibility that the clerk has at the Unemployment Office is to clock in on time, follow the guidelines set down for them in the employee hand book and then do the best they can to get you a job in the time in which they are on the clock. Truth is, it is not their job to get us a job at all, it is their job to find opportunities for us to explore and the rest is up to us!

The Government that we have come to know and love is, in fact nothing more than a lot of office buildings with people in them doing jobs, just like you and I and at five-o-clock they all go home and Government as we would like it to exist, no longer does until they all clock in again the following morning.

Lee