Forgiveness seems to be the hardest thing

Hello, blog fans. Apologies for the radio silence, but I’m bi-i-sy doin’ a-lo-ot, workin’ the whole day-and-night through, tryin’ to find lots of things not to put off doing. To no avail. 

I’ve set about blogging during odd downtimes and have got several on the go in various degrees of (in)completeness, from opening paragraphs to all-done-bar-the-punchlines. But I can’t seem to finish them, partly because I’ve argued it all before: Brexit is Brill; Woke is Wawful; Socialism Sucks. Only so often can I state the bleedin’ obvious without getting bored and without boring my blog fans. However, I think I’ve cracked it this time, thanks to a distant memory from my master’s degree, a week on holiday (which was so full-on, I need another one), and Easter Sunday’s Wordle.

My master’s was in Environment, Policy and Society (not that there is such a thing, per Maggie), i.e. I studied not just the environment but people as well. Very important as shall become clear. One paper I read back then was about Hogarth and his Four Stages of Cruelty. The first stage is the fictional Tom Nero as a child, torturing a dog. He graduates to beating a horse, then robbery, seduction and murder. The series ends with Nero's body taken from the gallows and mutilated in an anatomical theatre. Hogarth's morality tale is that being cruel to animals leads to cruelty to your fellow human beings, and comeuppance. It’s therefore reasonable to assume that being kind to animals, and the natural environment by extension, means you’re kind to humans. 

Not necessarily.

Some pious-ees I come across behave as if being kind to the environment exonerates them from having to be kind to people, or at least justifies their unkindness to any poor s*d who doesn’t talk their talk and walk their walk in the vocabulary and manner of their choosing. They also behave as if being kind to the environment somehow excuses them from doing their homework and checking facts and context. But who cares about the truth, as long as their crocodile tears fall in woke rainbow colours, and the Bilious Backstabbing Craperation gives them some airtime. 

Talking of cr*p, what about those sewage spills, eh? For some reason, operating a wastewater treatment system as it was designed to be operated, and which climate change, Covid and Ukraine have taken by surprise, is somehow a bigger crime than vehicles coughing up noxious exhaust gases that kill inner city asthmatic kids: yet I never hear calls for automotive industry bosses to be publicly stoned. I’m not justifying the sewage spills; I’m wafting the whiff of eco-inconsistency under everyone's noses. As for not doing homework, here’s one example out of millions: Sharkey once accused Scottish Water of polluting a Welsh coastline, and it wasn’t even Welsh Water’s fault; a private sewer system had failed!

As timely as ever, there was a cracking piece in the Spectator recently. Douglas Murray was bemoaning the fact that our society (not that there is such a thing) has lost the ability to forgive.

He mused, “People gleefully rake over the outrage. For many, it gives life a meaning of a sort … Clearly people enjoy the thrill. Because it is thrilling. But what they have failed to consider is that they are abandoning one of the most important ethical beliefs in our whole Judaeo-Christian civilisation: forgiveness. And not just forgiveness for people you like and eternal damnation for anyone you don’t. But forgiveness available to all.”

This is relevant, because water industry bosses continue to apologise for the sewage spills, the causes of which mostly pre-date their personal tenures, and they are desperately trying to do something about the problem. But not only is no forgiveness or forbearance forthcoming from those who don’t have a clue about engineering, hydrology, geology, ecology, biochemistry, economics, corporate finance or planning, just doing the job is becoming increasingly difficult, and progress stymied, by others' political a*se-covering, point-scoring, and Joe Public refusing to accept his/her/their/ones (I can do woke) partial responsibility by wasting water and flushing things they shouldn’t down the loo.

Murray continues, “… we live in a society that spends a great deal of energy working out how to bring people down. While our mechanisms for condemning have never been more readily to hand, is anyone thinking about the only tools to counter that? The mechanisms of forgiveness. If there is, I have yet to hear about it. Our church leaders spend much of their time talking about current shibboleths instead of preaching the actual gospel, let alone presenting perhaps the most extraordinary and truly revolutionary aspect of the Christian message – the commandment to not just forgive but also to love your enemies.”

Listen, if I can love Remoaners, then swimmers and 'fisherpersons' (this woke-thing is addictive) can love the water industry. In fact, my recent holiday revealed how much progress they’ve made greening their operations, not because Ofwat told them to but because they genuinely want to. Surprisingly, they say they enjoy engaging with the public, most of whom are polite and receptive, which proves my point that the ones who aren’t polite and receptive don’t bother doing their homework by talking to the people who do know what they’re talking about.

So what’s this to do with Easter Sunday’s Wordle? Answer: I’m sticking up for the water industry which, to the unforgiving, is …

… T A B O O!