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1. Thoughts on hoarding.
We consider ourselves to be citizens but our sense of 'citizen' is an impoverished one. We demand our rights, our right to vote our right to welfare but when it comes to duties to others, it's far too abstract.
We consider ourselves to be citizens but our sense of 'citizen' is an impoverished one. We demand our rights, our right to vote our right to welfare but when it comes to duties to others, it's far too abstract.
2. We have little sense of connection to our neighbourhoods, let alone the idea of a community.
Well that's unfair, perhaps in small villages and towns there is a real sense of community, a place of where civic action is not just an ideal taught in class and then forgotten, ...
Well that's unfair, perhaps in small villages and towns there is a real sense of community, a place of where civic action is not just an ideal taught in class and then forgotten, ...
3. ... or just used to bash opponents in our neverending political arguments
It's where communities themselves run their own lives, their own food banks, visit their shops where they know people's names and have a sense of collective whole, i.e community.
It's where communities themselves run their own lives, their own food banks, visit their shops where they know people's names and have a sense of collective whole, i.e community.
4. But that's the problem: if our sense of community only raises it's head when there's an emergency and dissipates in the mundane every day, then perhaps its revealing that this so called society that Boris has belatedly discovered is more impoverished than we ever thought.
5. If this so called 'society' seems not to exists save when the government rallies us around it, then perhaps it doesn't exist as much as way we think it does, as much as we want it to, and for those in need, as much as it needs to.
6. So no I don't think hoarding is just a moral question for individuals but a more urgent one that raises questions how we organise and live our lives. We don't a have sense of community because our lifes are free floating; we don't live lives embedded in communities.
7. How can we then expect people to have a real sense of other people, that is to say a sense of obligation to others, when our lives are normally without sense of collective whole?
8. For a sense that 'others may need it more than me' to have real moral force such that we actually refrain and leave the milk and egg to someone else, implictly relies on a real sense where our lives have a sense of those very people foregrounded in our thinking.
9. Yet walking down the aisles of these massive hypermarkets, it simply hard to think like that, except that others may get it before me. So then, it's only rational - what a plastic word is rational eh? - only rational to put me, myself and not forgetting my family first.
10. Is it then any wonder that our sense of citizenship is so impoverished, that when we shop we think of ourselves alone and we shop in fear that others may take it before us?
11. If our everyday life indulges in competitive consumerism, let's not be surprised then, if in times of emergency we find our neighbours hoarding.
As for me of course. I'm not hoarding I'm just making sure I have enough at home, because others are thinking of themselves alone.
As for me of course. I'm not hoarding I'm just making sure I have enough at home, because others are thinking of themselves alone.
