The Cruel Reality of Life in Modern Britain

The late Zig Ziglar, a great motivational speaker and life coach before that was a thing, often said, "You cannot be a wandering generality in life. You must become a meaningful specific."

Giovanni Rose is more than halfway to where Zig Ziglar would want him to be. Now he needs some luck, which may have come to him in this opinion piece by Aditya Chakrabortty.

For those of us who have made it to a level where momentum takes us to more good things rather than further along a path of obscurity, maybe we should read this story and consider if we've done everything we can to help people we've met who have the potential to be like Giovanni Rose, but have not yet articulated what makes them meaningful.

And now lets quickly check how many billions of $$$ the world spends on totally pointless military expenditures, and how much we could improve life for people in underserved communities if we just re-tasked 10% of that money.

Yeah, Rose seems like he is vectored onto the right flight path and has great situational awareness. Wish him the best of luck.

Don’t know how helpful the actual article will be for him, though. There is an element of emotional pornography associated with detachedly reading about the struggles of others, especially those who are the “flavor of the month”.

“While he’s revising for his A-levels, ask yourself two questions: how Great can Britain be, if a boy counts himself lucky just to survive here? And what is the value of a childhood home if you’re constantly taught you must leave it behind?”

OK

1. Comparing his opportunities in GB v. any other country in which he may have found himself, pretty Great. He got a spread in the Guardian for a start.

And how do you think he, or you, define “survival”?

There is no evidence he suffered/suffers childhood stunting from malnutrition, something that one third of children in India (1.4B population) experience.

https://www.globalhungerindex.org/india.html

There is no evidence he is part of the 40M who live in slavery in 2021.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_21st_century

No evidence he served in the military or lived in an active war zone. Sounds like he lived in a high personal crime area, by UK standards at least. So there is that.

I think there is a difference between the actual physical “survival” that hundred of millions of actual physical people worry about, and the poetic use of the word “survival” in this article. I don’t argue poetry.

2. Leaving his childhood home?

Is he being forcibly displaced as 80M people can claim to be in the year 2021?

https://www.unhcr.org/refugee-statistics/

Or just one of the 200M international migrants every year?

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/01/iom-global-migration-...

Or will he be one of the 763M internal migrants?

https://www.iom.sk/en/migration/migration-in-the-world.html

Leaving your hometown sets a very low threshold for “cruelty”. I’d prefer to save that word for, say, actual atrocities. The author is free to choose from any one of several categories of atrocities, freely available with a simple web search. We don’t need to expand the definition…there is plenty of actual cruelty to address. Look forward to the author actually doing that in the future.