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.
