Individuals trump ‘society’

I was working on a blog about trade unions and strikes, but parked it when I read about nine-year-old Olivia Pratt-Korbel. She was shot dead while standing behind mum Cheryl, who was injured, in their terraced home in Kingsheath Avenue in the Dovecot area of Liverpool. Residents say that Kingsheath is a close-knit community where children play together on the street. They describe Olivia and Cheryl as quiet, respectable people.

Olivia attended St Margaret Mary's Catholic Junior School where she was “much loved … with a beautiful smile, a lovely sense of humour, and a bubbly personality. She was kind-hearted and would go out of her way to help others. She loved to perform and recently participated in the school production of The Wizard of Oz.” She had an Aunty Kim and an Uncle Tony, and a cousin Rebecca Louise. Olivia liked to wear pink and pose for the camera.

She was killed on the 15th anniversary of the murder of 11-year-old Rhys Jones, who was gunned down in Croxteth, less than three miles from Dovecot.

Strikes, Brexit, Covid, Partygate, cost-of-living crisis, blah blah blah, pale into insignificance compared to Olivia’s murder. What compounds the tragedy is, it’s not a rare event. Too many innocents, e.g. Rhys Jones, are caught in the crossfire, abused, savaged by dogs, and tortured and murdered by those who should care for and protect them. 

Statistics, excuses, contexts, finger-pointing, buck-passing, theories, apologies, promises, politicising. Sick of it all. I metaphorically put myself in the shoes of each and every individual innocent victim and their families and friends, whatever their colour or creed, prostrate myself on the floor and beat it with my fists in distress and anger.

I’ve always sympathised more with individuals than amorphous masses like Maggie’s ‘society’ (as in, “there’s no such thing as”). I’m not politicising; I meant it when I said in the previous paragraph that I was sick of it. I’m trying to put my emotional reactions into some sort of a philosophical? psychological? moral? context. For example, I frequently roll my eyes at everyone banging on about catch-all mental health crises in the workplace, in schools, on planet Zog, when most of the time it’s just normal stress levels that have always been with the human race; we really do need to get a grip. However, I’m always there for and never belittle family, friends and acquaintances should they feel the need to cry on my shoulder.

The eco-zealots, who claim to be saving the planet by causing mayhem on the M25, don’t get any truck from me because they’re harming, to various extents, other people who are no more guilty of harming the planet than the hypocritical zealots themselves. Except, I don’t see them as ‘other people’. I think of them as an unemployed middle-aged HGV driver who misses a job interview. A 60-year-old woman desperately trying to get to hospital to visit her sick dad. A single mum struggling to get her two kids to school on time before heading off to work.

(Spoiler alert for the parked blog about strikes.) My default (but not necessarily my blanket) position is to be against strikes because of the impact on third parties who haven’t denied the strikers anything. Third parties? Not on your nelly. One’s a plumbing apprentice who won’t stop having nightmares until his attackers are jailed. The other is a young banker wrongly accused of fraud who can’t get his life back on track until he’s proved his innocence in a court of law.

Climate change is already causing untold misery to thousands in this country who are seeing their homes flooded and their lives turned upside down. Thousands? One’s a teenager who now gets anxious every time it rains. Another is a tenant farmer whose carrot crop has failed. Not to mention the engineer who can’t get home to kiss his kids goodnight because, instead of fixing three burst mains a day, he’s dealing with ten.

Each and every one of these ‘victims’ is a real person who has a name, an age, an address (even if it's 'no fixed abode'), a school or job or ambition. They have different personalities, different interests, different family members and friends. On the other hand, ‘society’, ‘other people’, ‘third parties’, ‘thousands’ are just ethereal blobs: nameless, directionless, soulless vagaries that you can’t warm to like you can a nine-year-old Olivia or an Everton-mad Rhys.

I don’t want the middle-aged HGV driver, the young banker or the tenant farmer to be dismissed as collateral damage or dehumanised in a heartless utilitarian calculation any more than I do the Olivias and Rhys’s of this world to be remembered only as a statistic or a nefarious symptom of a ‘society’-gone-wrong. There’s more to Olivia, Rhys and their families and friends than that, as there is to the driver, banker and farmer.