Humpty Dumpty

In the 1960s, I worked in the newly independent country of Sierra Leone, West Africa. It had a functioning parliament, a decent opposition and Siaka Stevens as the elected President. Although I lived in the most lawless part of the country, Kidu - the place where illicit diamond mining was rife, I could walk unarmed into town, buy stuff and come back safely. I taught in a Secondary School which was teaching boys and a few girls straight out of the local villages and sending them to University.

It worked.

And then it didn't. And the “didn't” took about five years.

The Headmaster of the local Catholic school, himself an ordained priest, showed me his gun. When a thief broke into his school dormitories, the boys left him for dead outside the school. We, too, were broken into. Coolly and calmly our front door was lifted off its hinges and, while I chased one of the perpetrators round the compound with my machete, they entered our house where my wife and two young children were cowering under the bed clutching the precious record player.

We left just before society completely broke down and the West Side Boys took over with their drugs, their violence and their fun.

From this I learned how very thin the crust of civilization can be.

Looking back, how many Russians would have believed in, say, 1904 that tiny Japan would defeat the mighty Russian Empire? Or that after the disaster of the first World War, the Ukraine – the bread basket of Russia – would actually be forced into starvation?

How many Germans, looking back, would have believed, in prosperous 1912, that in just a couple of years, their beloved Kaiser would flee to Holland and that their rich, hard working and disciplined country would commit the most atrocious acts in the whole of human history?

Even twenty years ago, I would never have believed that our British Chancellor, Sajid Javid, would be a Muslim. Or that the majority of Londoners would be either of African heritage, or Muslims or immigrants of some sort or other. Or that the immigrants themselves would produce new problems – massive knife crime based on the already fashionable drug trade, human trafficking (aka modern slavery) or that I would see Russians urinating in the streets of my country town, Wisbech?

The crust of our civilization is certainly wearing thin. Brexit hasn't helped. Language is getting coarser and more abusive. There are death threats. There are Twitter storms. People are taking sides.

Once the crust is broken, is is like Humpty Dumpty, impossible to reconstruct.

I wrote this using the template which you can find underneath if you scroll down.