Talking quietly and NOT carrying a stick at ALL!

It has been a pretty TopsyTurvey world the last few months for every one, banks, age old high street brands, pensions, and confidence in the world as we thought we knew it. All disappearing like "snow of a dyke" as the Scots saying goes.

Undoubtedly lives have been ruined, and more importantly peoples hopes and dreams for their family and themselves have been crushed, sometimes overnight or even in the space of an afternoon. Perhaps this is the biggest single area of damage done by the global crises including the swine flue outbreak, people entrench themselves and their views, protecting themselves to the detriment of others, looking after number one and their own suddenly becomes all consuming.

People lose sight of hope and ambition, and in general settle for less not expect more of themselves and the society they live in. We saw it about bankers pay off's and pensions, we saw it again this week with the strikes about redundancies, and of course we saw it about MP's expenses. The blame game and the baying for blood were the soundtrack, not the voices that were saying the system is broke lets make a better one.

On the level of looking to vent anger and to apportion blame I think it's a human that we react emotionally and not rationally. The more so as those that seem to have screwed us over seem to have already fled the scene or get to flee, with there lives more or less intact. Even those that have been publicly put in the stocks the sacrificial goats if you like are paid handsomely to divert the attention of the mob and let both other culprits and the system that's broke get away like a cat bugler with the loot and a plan to lie low till it's quieter.

The mob face poverty and debt as well as social, medical, and emotional melt down. Is this the true nature of globalisation, the more we pull ourselves apart in our drive to pursue individualism, the more the poor in Caracas feel the recession started in Washington, via the vast middle class of Britain. Then again I was never a fan of poor people being paid a pittance to supply richer people with stuff they don't need, or capitalism to give it it's proper name.

The mob though has a massive flaw. They tend to be wrong most of the time, as in the looking after number one mindset. It may seem like a perfectly rational thing to do, but when has protectionism ever worked? It has lead to wars, nationalism the bad kind, racism, eugenics, and other forms of discrimination too many to count.

The mob breads fear, they form a collective against difference and change. Mobs run amok with conspiracy theories and imagined enemies either taking their jobs, land, or culture away from them. They become so paranoid that people have to die sometimes in large numbers in order for enough people to snap out of their collective madness.

We all have a responsibility to not be part of the mob, we all need to step up with our own ideas and thoughts, not just regurgitate what others have said, or believe facts as told to you by a newspaper or some guy in the pub. Think for yourself should be tattooed on one arm, and critical thinking should be taught from nursery all the way through school.

Lastly we should all communicate our thoughts in our own communities so that other people who live in the same areas as each other can test out your ideas and thoughts against their own experience and logic. Phoning shock jocks writing to national papers, appearing on day time telly either to defend or decry people or things you have no immediate personal knowledge of, is not 15 minutes of fame, it is declaring you are part of the mob and so likely to be part of the problem.