Take a leaf
out of our glorious leaders’ book – it’s just the one book titled ‘don’t give a
shit’ even about a crisis - even if you caused the crisis.
Those who
lead us a merry dance to Armageddon don’t experience it and anxiety has becomes
an over-used euphemism for the self-pity of cosseted millennials. It’s also a
fairly useless emotion. Let’s ditch the word for 2020.
Anxiety is a
word now even being ascribed to concerns about the environment. Some of my
favourite columnists began the year discussing ways to assuage our anxiety as
if the biggest problem with global apocalypse is that it’s making middle class
white people feel anxious rather than
that its already wiping out poor defenceless coastal communities in places the UK
doesn’t really care about as it happily disengages from the collective action
of EU membership and meanders towards
the mirage of a perfect 1950s Britain where women wore pinafores, men did manual jobs until they died of emphysema and it was ok to be sexist and racist.
Permanently
looking at the world all through the self-regard magnifying glass will just
make you properly ill plus as I’ve said many times before– if you aint feeling
anxious about the state of the world right now you’re not normal so then it
becomes a case of my ‘got anxiety’ is bigger than yours. I bet it’s not.
In short –
if you are lucky enough to have a doctor to go to who will confirm that you
have ‘anxiety issues’ you are very, very lucky indeed and we really don’t need
to worry about you. We actually need to worry about the people with Ebola /
Malaria / Cholera who have no doctors or the people whose food sources are gone
because of pollution or whose parents have died locked in a ‘factory’ in India
making the jeans you wore to the doctor’s appointment where it was confirmed
that you have ‘anxiety issues.’
BUT better
still just don’t care. The US blob Trump doesn’t. He does do tantrums but
that’s a whole different thing. He was quite happy to attempt – again – to
start WWIII from his private golf course. The Australian blob Scott Morrison,
who doesn’t accept that the climate and environment are in crisis, had to be
dragged back from his Hawaiian holiday while Australia was literally burning.
And our own blob Boris Johnson – having successfully steered the rotten Brexit
tanker onto the rocks didn’t cut short his Caribbean holiday even though his
brother blob across the pond had – as we established earlier – had another go
at kicking off WWIII.
So – join the blobs and don’t give a shit.