The Story

It’s been quite a week, hasn’t it? It was last Sunday that I first noticed The Story (as I shall refer to the topic causing a big media feeding frenzy right now, and for the foreseeable future, I guess). It was buried some way down in the pile of media priorities and a little voice in my head (probably my own, hopefully my own!) said, “This is going to change, and fast” and it did. By Monday morning, The Story was front-page headline gobsmacking, fear-inducing NEWS. Blimey. We never hear about the many, many thousands of people who die of malaria in Africa every year, do we?  Nor do we see a rising panic over the probably entirely preventable deaths of thousands of old people who catch the flu in the UK every winter.

A needless death is a needless death, don’t get me wrong, but if we don’t contextualise everything that beams into our heads then we’re on a fast-track to losing the minds we have by drowning them in suspicion, superstition and panic. An inability to put things into perspective is a sure way of ending up on Crazy Street, where the pavement is painted with red spots, all the houses are pink and the neighbours all wear surgical masks.

I’m off on Monday with my beloved to go see rock star Pink at the O2 Arena in London (you know the place—it was once called the Millennium Dome and was famous for the world over for being hugely expensive and very crap). Yes, we’re going at the onset of a pandemic to hear a woman sing Get The Party Started. We’ll effectively be in a confined space with, what, 40,000 other people? I don’t know the exact capacity of the O2 Arena. It may be much higher, it may be considerably less. But let’s face it, with The Story telling us The Thing has arrived in London, we know that we’re kind of putting ourselves potentially in harm’s way. But not only because of the presence of The Thing. That, to be honest, is small fry compared to the far greater chances every day of being mugged, or otherwise attacked, or tripping over your own shoelaces, or being hit by a bus or car.

In fact I suspect right now you’ve got more chance of being hit by a frozen block of urine falling from an aeroplane at 10,000 feet than you do of catching a killer bug and drowning in your bed. It’s like the terror every now and again over Ecstasy. Many more cyclists die on British roads from being knocked under lorries than do people who have necked a pill to dance all night to music that, were they sober, they would probably strongly dislike. But squashed cyclists aren’t so newsworthy, aren’t so exciting, as the notion that the pursuit of pleasure through illegal chemical stimuli (as opposed to legal chemical stimuli, like the high people get when they’ve eaten a KFC meal or a Big Mac) can kill you by dehydating you (if you don’t drink water) so badly that you end up looking like Lot’s wife after The Salt Incident.

It’s the media excitement over the possibility of pandemic that really, truly, sickens me. Almost as much as the flu—an ordinary flu—did last month. I’ve no problem with reportage. We have a right to know, to be informed. It’s the increasing prevalence in so-called newspapers, though, of that phenomenon known as The Personal Column. You know, where journalists get paid for what we bloggers do all the time. In a newspaper most people expect to read the truth (though some of us don’t). Instead, they get opinion and musings masquerading as authority, as truth. And that’s wrong. Blogs you expect to read, you know you’re getting, personal opinion. Even when bloggers write truthfully, it is their truth and not necessarily your own, and a good blogger knows this. As does a clever reader.

If people were generally educated in the skill known as discernment, it wouldn’t be a problem. But we aren’t. It’s a lottery of natural-born intelligence or not much at all, good or bad education depending on where you live and what support you get, and an ability or not to think outside the box that leaves you capable of seeing into the gaps between the words, or not.

I pity all those who just soak up whatever the media spews out like giant sponges. Empty vessels just waiting to be tanked up on fear, prejudice, bigotry, superstition… I know, I know. I mentioned superstition already. There’s a reason for doing so twice. It’s this: for all our iPods, our ability to go into outer space, our grand achievements in science, technology, the arts, despite everything we’ve achieved since we climbed down from the trees, we remain stubbornly superstitious and with a medieval core to the thing we call modern society. The world of man, like his heart and soul, is made up of many accumulated layers of history, experience, lies, propaganda and—just every now and then—universal as well as subjective truths.

I’m not ready to leap back in time to a world without roll-on deodorants and start shouting “Unga! Bunga! Oog!” while clobbering a prospective partner with a stick as a means of flirting. So I’m going to indulge my inner caveman not by going all freaked out about something I cannot see, taste, touch or change, but instead by having a riotous time jigging about to the music of Pink like, we’re told by dullards, no man of 42 years should ever behave. But I’m not just any 42-year-old man. I am not going to be weighed down by responsibilities forced upon me, not my own.

I am my own man, my own self. And I say to you, remember in this time of rampant hysteria and misinformation, of panic and fear, that you, too, are an individual. Be your own self. Make up your own mind. Do your own thing.

Above all else, live. It’s what we’re here to do. Whatever else you believe or don’t believe, about spirit, afterlife, God or gods, we can surely all agree that life is a wonderful thing. We should not spend whatever time we have left in a perpetual state of less than. Fuck less than. Be more. You always have more to give, more to see, more to do, more to experience. That will never change, even when you’re on your death bed. So get out there. Enjoy the sunshine and the rain.

Please, though, accept the gift of Beltane blessings from this writer, and recognise the beauty that is all around and inside of you. Be vigorous, dynamic, thoughtful, entertaining, sociable, happy, sad, argumentative, even disruptive… Be human. Don’t be scared. There’s no reason to be scared. Que sera sera. Doris Day was right: whatever will be, will be. The true story isn’t found in headlines about The Story. The true story, the one worth telling, is your own. Blessed be.

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