Growing up in poverty in an affluent area

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“We need to eradicate middle class attitudes to the working class. We need to deliver better education to those who have it harder than the rest.”

Warning’s emerged yesterday from schools minister, David Laws, that poorer pupils do better in more deprived areas of the country than in richer parts of Britain.

He accused school’s “in the leafiest parts of the country” of wasting pupil premium funding, as the department of education revealed that only 42 per cent of pupils who are allegeable for free school meals, got five GCSE’s, compared to the 67 per cent who come from wealthier backgrounds.

Schools receive pupil premium funding to support students who come from low-income families. But as exam results points out, this money hasn’t been used to help poorer students with their education. The money hasn’t touched them.

Rightly so, Mr. Laws is furious and has threatened culprit schools with closure if they continue to miss-spend pupil premium funding.

You would think, at first glance, that if you lived in a more well to do area of the country, you would have a better chance in life than if you didn’t.

The truth is that if you are poor in this country, you are going to have a harder time, wherever you live.

I can talk from my own experience, because I am one of those who coming from a poorer background, but grew up in the middle class area.

I count myself lucky to live in such an area because it is a safe and beautiful. There were little worries for my mum as I played outside as a kid, because there’s basically a non-existent crime rate in Welwyn garden city.

But I would be lying if I said growing up was all plain sailing, particularly at school.

It’s difficult for people who are working class, who live in middle class areas, because you are constantly being reminded of your poverty.

I am an avid listener of dessert island disks, and like to listen to people stories of them growing up. One thing that struck me when listening is the stories of people who came from poorer backgrounds. A lot of these people have mentioned that they didn’t know their social class, until they got university and mixed with people from other classes.

I’ve known that I am working class, ever since I was young because it was very apparent the difference between me, and the people in my school or town.

I remember going around a friend’s house and being shocked at their large dinners they would have, because most nights at home we would have toast for dinner. I remember having old school uniform on that was getting too short for me, while other kids that wouldn’t have that worry. I would never dared to mention an upcoming school trip to mum, because I knew we wouldn’t be able to afford it, and would sit alone in a class, while everyone else went off on the latest trip. Nevertheless, I was happy, as a child.

None of this was my mum’s fault. She was a single parent and I couldn’t of asked for a more loving and caring mum. We happened to live in poverty because of chance, and the financial difficulty it is of bringing up two children on your own.

But living in a middle class area, you are constantly being judged. We were victimized because of our circumstance. People didn’t look at us and thought “its nice to see a happy loving family” they just saw poor lazy scum. This attitude seems to be nationwide.

The reason why we were victimized for being poor is because it’s in the very nature of the middle class. They are always trying to separate themselves from the working class because they seek to have there own identity: they are not rich enough to be part of aristocracy, but richer than the working class. They sit in the middle and that is precisely why they look down their nose at people below them.

It is absolutely disgusting that pupil premium funding is being wasted. I could of done with receiving that support myself when I was at school, and believe I would be in a better position now if I had done so. I am dyslexic and have dyspraxia, however i received not a drop of help from school.

It’s only through my escaping to the public library that helped me fall in love with reading and writing.

We need to eradicate middle class attitudes to the working class. We need to deliver better education to those who have it harder than the rest. We are wasting people like old banana skins by not investing in people full potential.

The death of Thatcher

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“To celebrate her death isn’t to celebrate the death of a woman, it is a moment to express your ideas and views that contrasted with hers”

The death of our former prime minister has managed to bisect this country into two. On the day after her death, the national newspapers seem to be at war, with some claiming Thatcher was the grand savior of Britain, while other papers claimed she was responsible for dividing and damaging Britain.

Twitter became a battleground also, with people on the right and left trying to dominate the twittersphere with their views on Margret Thatcher.

In some areas around the country, celebrations broke out. People gathered on the streets in Brixton, Liverpool and Glasgow in attempt  to revel in her death.

The media, particular those papers that lean to the right, condemned these celebrations as “disgusting and sick”.

Before we even go into what she represented and what she did to our country, let’s talk about the condemned celebrations of her death.

Is it acceptable to rejoice in someone’s death?

The answer in short is: Yes.

If you are person who is the public eye, whether you the Politician, and artist, a musician or a simple celebrity, it should be acceptable.

When you’re in that public domain, you immediately represent something bigger than just being another human being. Your ideas and work become bigger than yourself. This is the case if you are a minor local celebrity or the leader of a country.

This is why we, as a society, look at celebrities as superhuman.

Maggie thatcher is more than just an old woman. She is the face of right wing ideas and views that affected people’s lives.

To celebrate her death isn’t to celebrate the death of a woman, it is a moment to express your ideas and views that contrasted with hers.

That’s one thing for me that has been refreshing for me, is to be reminded that people on the left of the political spectrum still exists in this country.

When Bin Laden died, and people took to the streets in Washington, there was no condemnation of those celebrations, so why should there be for the thatcher’s death?

You could argue that Maggie Thatcher was no responsible for a major terrorist attack.

But she was still responsible for a lot of misery, with its effects still happening today.

She was responsible for “aspirational Britain”, for a country that aspires to materialist things rather than social equality.

If that not alone isn’t enough to justify the celebrations of Maggie’s death, then we are truly lost.

There’s no where to hide anymore George

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“This country needs an injection of socialism into its veins”

Growth killer George Osborne has been Chancellor of the Exchequer for three disastrous years now. The sinking balloon economy he inherited from New Labour, during those three years, has been hacked and slashed to pieces by his austerity axe.

There is little chance we will be seeing that balloon fly again any time soon.

We have seen Osborne’s cuts dig us a deeper grave ever since they have came in force.

We were pulled under the murky waters of recession not once, but twice. We have seen devastating affects to community’s as government spending was sliced. We have seen disabled people in this country fall victims of cruel cuts in their benefits. Our youth have become disenchanted with constant bleak news: from the likelihood of having to work until there are over 70 to receive a pension, to outrageous hikes in tuition fees. The list could go on and on.

The conservative led coalition’s spending cuts have made this country suffer.

George Osborne the man who should of turned to neo Keynesian tactics a long time ago, has been widely and rightly attacked for his failure as Chancellor of the Exchequer.

In his defense, he has always relied on that one card in his deck: Britain’s AAA credit rating.

He has always answered his critics with: Britain still maintained its AAA rating, and that alone demonstrated that the “world has confidence” in him and his policies.

But it looks like that card is no longer in his deck. Last week that prized credit rating was taken away and replaced with  AA1 rating .

There are no places left for George to hide.

It’s about time we had some change.

This country needs an injection of socialism into its veins.

Socialism will put some colour back into the pale cheeks of our economy, but also our society and well- being.

We need a government that cares about the well being of our society and not a government obsessed with capital.

Clement Atlee, the greatest Prime minister this country has seen, understood the importance of socialism. Instead of imposing terrifying cuts to tackle Britain’s debt mountain after the second world war, he created the NHS, a welfare state, and built housing and railways. The country became alive again after the war.

We are so obsessed with the individual in our society instead of the idea of the community. We only care about our own little empires, our own little jobs and our own little selves.

We are too busy trying to get the next mobile phone, have the next best television and computer, that we don’t know about other peoples problems.

We are becoming more and more isolated and it’s unhealthy.

If we could bring back the idea of socialism in our capital obsessed culture we might do us selves all a favor.

We are an aging society. In the near future there is going to be more over-60s than any other age group living in our country.

What are we going to do when we get to that stage?

Throw all of them in a care home and visit them once a year?

It would be better for everyone if we cared more about each other .

Some argue that as we become a more secular society we have broken down communities as a price.

This is not true.

It was Thatcherism that broke our soul.

Lets not let Thatcherite’s sell off our communities. Let get rid of austerity.

Food

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“We care more about the visual-aesthetics of food rather that what is actually in the food”

Since last month, when the horsemeat scandal first arose, I’ve had to grit my teeth and do a lot a painful pretend laughing.

I work behind the meat counter in Tesco’s, and as you can imagine nearly half the customers I have served, have personally delivered their own horse-related joke.

But the escalating horsemeat scandal is no joke. It is nothing but a small serving of a much bigger problem: our country’s relationship with food.

After working on the meat and poultry department for over a year now, even I can not tell you much about the origins of a lot of the meat products that we sell, and it looks like neither can the food standards authority, as they have been running a wild goose chase through Europe to find the origins of these burgers after finding horse and pig DNA in various beef product sold in supermarkets.

Highlighted by this case of equestrian embarrassment is our supermarket bug that we have all caught.

Four supermarket-chains control up to 80 per cent of British food retail. Supermarkets feed our nation, and make a lot of profit out of it, but do they feed us responsibly?

In order for supermarkets to make a profit, Suppliers to supermarkets loose out. They receive a lot of pressure from retailers to keep prices down, and that has resulted in them using cheaper European meat rather than expensive British meat in their products. The quality of the products suffer as supplier have to seek cheaper alternatives.

But this brings us back to our eating habits. We are so used to supermarkets feeding us that we’ve developed a weird relationship with food.

We care more about the visual-aesthetics of food rather that what is actually in the food.

When you look at the joints, the mince and burgers laid out behind the counter in your supermarket they are a bright beautiful red. The meat is lit up in a bright light and looks outstanding. It’s the same with the fruit and vegetables, they are all perfect in shape and color. They look almost plastic.

I walked through Istanbul the other week and scattered around the city are hundreds of small butchery’s and small vegetable stands. The meat is brown. The vegetables and fruits are different shades of color and shapes. They look messy and unorganized.

However, If you taste a banana or a beef joint from one of these Istanbul butchers or vegetable stands, your going to taste a just as good banana as you are from your supermarket, if not better, for a much cheaper price.

The horrific statistics show that we waste in the world between 30 to 50 percent of all the food we produce. Supermarkets are mainly responsible for this.  They chuck tons of perfectly edible food that isn’t the right shape or maybe a slightly different color. What’s wrong with a juicy banana that just so happens to be straight rather than curly? What’s wrong with mouth-watering sirloin steak that is a bit brown rather that bright cartoonish red?

Nothing is, and that is precisely the problem. We are so focused on what our food looks like that we don’t take in count what is actually in our food, or that supermarkets are making a lot of profit from what we are eating.

We need to stop worrying about what our food looks like and worry about what we are eating. We cannot afford to continue this weird relationship with food, when so many are going hungry.

Django Unchained

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Like a lot of Quentin Tarantino’s movies, his latest; Django Unchained, has been wrapped up in controversy. Critics have slammed the film as disrespectable and tasteless, while others have praised it as another Tarantino classic.

With violence and guns at the moment being a very sensitive subject for people, this new Tarantino has been a hard film to watch for some, but this is not the main reason why it has caused the controversy amongst movie critics.

The film deals with the grim subject of the slave trade of African people, a subject that people don’t like to deal with in movies. I can count the amount of movies I have seen that deal with the subject of the slavery of African people on one hand.

This jumps out as something quite worrying. While we have moved along way from the days of being an openly racist world, with Barack Obama, the first black president in power at the moment elected for a second term and racism widely condemned by most in society, it is still important to remember this uncomfortable piece of history.

It is worrying because if you look at cinema, it can deal with uncomfortable bits of history easily, like the Genocide of Jewish people during the second World War, but seems to have a difficult time with depicting the horrors of ours, and America’s, most horrific crime in our history, the enslavement of Africans.

It’s interesting that they’re thousands of mainstream films that deal the holocaust of Jewish people and not of that of the holocaust of Africans. We seem to find it easier to condemn other peoples atrocities but not our own. We can distance ourselves from the Jewish holocaust because it happened in Germany and not the U.K. But we cannot distance ourselves from the slave trade and genocides in Africa that we are responsible for. This is dangerous, we have put ourselves on a pedestal. It’s like we almost see ourselves more moral than the rest of the world, when in reality we have committed evil beyond comprehension. Only when we start to address these atrocities in our history with honesty and compassion we will become a more intelligent society. Once we realize that there is no such thing as good and evil, them and us, we can be a more civilized society. We should understand, even though that now we live in a society that condemns prejudice, that every one of us are capable of doing evil things. Doing this will make us more rational, and have a better understanding of each other, and more compassionate.

Django Unchained has two levels of violence. The first level of violence is the signature-Tarantino violence, that over the top, beautiful violence you see that is almost cartoonish. The second level is the real hard violence you see of the depiction of the slave trade, the cruel and torturous world of 1800s America. Some scenes are hard to watch as a result. Even though the film is a fiction, has humorous moments and some outlandish lines, it depicts slavery with honesty and isn’t afraid to show a truly terrifying face of America, and for this, the film should be commended. It’s good for white people to be made uncomfortable while watching this film.

If I look at the films showing at the moment in my local cinema, this film is the only film playing that has an African American as the lead role of the film. There should be more balance, and fewer stereotypes. Black people always seem stereotyped in games and film. The angry sidekick captain or the sidekick with a bit of an attitude seems to be the only role black people have in the entertainment industry. Tarantino’s film should not receive more criticism, but more praise, even if the film is three hours long.

Religion has no place in a modern world

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Even if you had a tennis ball inside your skull instead of a brain, you probably could still realize that we just don’t need religion anymore in our society, in any form what so ever. Once again the high almighty ranks of religion have come up with a classic cretinous creation that has caused controversy.

 The Church of England now allows gay clergy to become bishops, but only under the condition that they remain celibate. The reason this latest move from the church has a special place reserved in the heaven of offensive and dumb-founded things, is because their straight bishop counterparts don’t have to swear to celibacy.

This latest announcement came very soon after the church clashed with public and also government view, as gay marriage was legalized.

After coming under fire from public view because they talked openly against gay marriage and also after voting against women clergy being able to become bishops, this latest announcement was a move to try and win back peoples hearts.

But because they are tied to an ancient book that has no place in the 21st century, instead of setting things right, the new rule for gay bishops was offensive and immoral.

Why should gay bishops be exempt from enjoying sex? We are on this planet to do two things: have sex and survive. I don’t see why gay people should people victimized by an organization of pale lifeless right wing god-fearing cretins. It’s not like if they introduced gay bishops without the celibacy condition that they will have to watch same-sex lovers make love. It doesn’t affect their lives in any form what so ever so why should the church have the right to dictate what people do with their lives?

As society is slowly becoming more connected and more moral, the church and other religions will begin to lose its place and importance.

Their position on gay marriage, women bishops and gay bishops confirms that religion is out of date and has no place in our 21st century world. 

Male Inadequacy: The Connecticut School Shooting and Computer Gaming Generation

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The United States of America witnessed its most gut wrenching school shooting on the 14th of December 2012.

26 were brutally murdered in Newtown in Connecticut, making this shooting to have a higher number of victims than the infamous Columbine shooting that shattered the lives of many in 1999.

Even then, it isn’t the number of people’s lives taken from them that is the most shocking fact of this despicable crime.

 It’s the fact that the shooting took place in an Elementary school which teaches kids between 5-10 years old, that has really made this particular tragedy hard for Americans to digest.

20 of the victims were just children.

6 were teachers.

Once again, that age-old question about gun control has surfaced in the media as a result. And, Once again we see brainless arguments defending the out-dated and unnecessary second amendment that dates back to 1791.

We all know the simple solution to stop these (frequent) painful and cruel crimes is to have a total ban on guns, so the unstable, like Adam Lanza, who was responsible for the Connecticut shooting, wouldn’t have the tools to do what he did in the first place.

Of course, A ban on firearms will not happen in America. They see it as an infringement of the human rights, like refusing them clean water.

It’s not just the familiar role of easy gun access that has played apart in this tribulation; our over-macho expectations in society have played a part as well.

Like many before him who have committed similar atrocities, Adam Lanza was a lonely awkward male.

He was described by his friends as a “painfully shy computer nerd” and “very clever but quiet”. He was signed a psychiatrist because the school was concerned how emotionally unattached he was.

Adam spent a lot of his time playing the Call of Duty computer game in the basement and was obsessive over Guns.

The police haven’t yet got a motive for Adam’s rampage, but there is one thing that could be said: having a gun in his hand made a shy quiet boy into a monster.

We live, and I imagine Adam did in America too, in a society where a lot of men and women feel inadequate because of the pressures and strains of a society that is too macho.

Even though we have gone along way since the 1950s, with homosexuality now widely accepted, we still put unnecessary pressures on ourselves of what it is expected to be a man.

We still expect men to be strong, always in control and self-contained. Men are expected to love sport and violence, and they are expected to look and treat at women as objects and not as human beings.

Any man who doesn’t match up to these things faces ridicule from society.

Computer games are the downfall of my male generation. I know too many people my age who are addicted to computer games.

I nearly was one of them myself; if it wasn’t for the lucky chance that my littlest brother put 5 pence in the disk-tray, exploding my x-box.

I know many friends who are shy, awkward, or just different from the macho-ideal they are suppose to be. Unfortunately men don’t talk about their problems. These friends of mine all suffer from severe depression. And now, like many in the world, these men’s lives are consumed by computer games and not much else.

It’s the drug of a generation that feels inadequate about them selves.

 When you are playing the likes of Call of duty on your game console, it makes you fell powerful, it makes you feel in control, and strong because your put into the shoes of the macho-ideal virtual character.

This is why it’s so addictive for men who don’t tick the right boxes of the macho-ideal because they made to feel like they can do anything on these computer games.

I’m not here to defend Adam Lanza. His crimes are unspeakable. But maybe he’s not so different from the rest of these awkward gamer types that populates our society now.

Maybe when he held those guns in his hand, just like my friends who play COD, he felt for the first time like he was in control and unstoppable, and finally confident in himself.

Maybe the gun-control debate isn’t the only thing that should be surfacing in the media right now.

Maybe we should be asking why so many men feel inadequate in society now, that the only way that they feel confident now is when they have a gun in there hand or a game controller.

As a society we need raise awareness of depression and start asking questions about it.

Untold History

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You don’t even raise an eye-lid. You don’t think about it. You are indifferent.

We are so used to seeing charity adverts that depict little black faces that are poverty-stricken and malnourished it doesn’t have any emotional impact on us anymore.

We just sit there, staring blankly at the TV screen, waiting for X-factor to come back on.

The last two weeks I’ve been watching a BBC documentary series called “why poverty?”

It has been for me, very interesting.

Interesting for me because it’s the first time I have learnt about some African history.

If you ask an average British person what they know about Africa, there will be little they will tell.

They will probably say something on the lines of:

“it’s got loads of lions and starving children”.

They probably even tell you that Africa’s a country, and not a continent.

The Reason why we look blankly without emotion at our TV screens when we see footage of severe African poverty is because we are incredibly ignorant.

We can’t connect with these Africans because their world seems too far and distant from ours. We feel no responsibility to these Africans.

This is dreadfully tragic and frightening because WE are personally responsible for the poverty and heartbreak that flourish’s in African countries.

The industrial revolution made us power-hungry and dangerous. We divided up Africa by any means possible, even if that meant using crushing force, rape, pillage and genocide.

After descending into world war, twice, Europeans didn’t end their torture of a continent. During the cold war, violent and backward dictators were given money, power and weapons from us.

Suddenly, the 90’s happened. The Cold war ended, but Africa’s problems just started.

All the weapons and money we gave to these dictators we wanted back, plunging African countries in a debt mountain that still cannot be climbed. Because of the debt, country’s rich in natural recourses in Africa effectively had to hand over their prized reserves to Western companies.

Next time you see a starving child, remember, that was us that made them that way.

We don’t feel responsible because we don’t learn about Africa at school. In history at school we learn about how great we were at beating the Nazi’s. We don’t learn about the fact that Britain is responsible for crimes against humanity that match and even out-weigh the horrific crimes of Nazi Germany.

If we did maybe we will do something next time we see someone on telly that has no water or food in Africa.

I’m going to make it my mission to learn more about African History. And we should be teaching our kids too.

Double Chin Britain

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Britain has not only got a double-dip recession to worry about, but also a double-chin problem too.

According to a new survey from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Britain sits second for the title of the fattest nation in Europe.

A wobbling one in four of us Brits are obese, and many more over-weight.

This is awful news for our physical health, but also for our mental health.

The models, film stars and celebrities that we all love and adore don’t have the same bodies, as the average Brit. Kate Moss’s body doesn’t represent our nation anymore.

This is damaging for our nations self-esteem, because we develop an ideal as a society of what the perfect body-image looks like through the bodies that we see in the media, then as we compare that to our own, which is nothing like that perfect-body image, it can make us feel low.

Low-self esteem can lead to depression, which is another headache for Britain. Our high levels of depression in this country, costs us a staggering £11Bn in lost earnings a year. It’s no surprise then, that the Coalition has put the Nation’s happiness on their agenda.

Maybe the answer to boosting our self-esteem, is that the models, film stars and celebrities in our media should have bodies that match up to that of the Average British porker. This would change our perception of what is considered beautiful and our body-image-ideal.

But then again we head into dangerous territory. If an over-weight person became what was considered to be sexy and sought after, like it was in the middle ages, we will risk damaging our physical health.

The only way we are going to make British people feel good about themselves is to make them cut their waist size down.

Obesity should be remaining as an illness, not a body-ideal.

Our pork-pie problem lies in the fact we lack good decent food skills.

A good solution would be if we introduced better cookery classes at schools, accessible to everyone. This way, we can get children to love cooking and preparing good food, so we beat the lazy microwaveable mad, easy meals culture that has made 26.1 per cent of British people, look like bean bags.

At the moment food classes at schools are next to non-existent. They are also expensive for those who live in poverty or are less well off. When I was at school, I avoided cookery because I knew I couldn’t afford the ingredients. Also, my cookery class teacher was also my P.E teacher, so I had no chance in hell. Luckily, I lived with my step-dad, a food lover and great cook, who taught me the importance of good food.

To make Britain healthy, we need cookery to be considered a serious subject for children.

To do this, it will involve government spending and investment, not more cuts.

 

Are We On The Road to World War 3?

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November, for me, is the best time to visit little old England. The country enters the last stages of autumn and gets covered in a fresh layer of cold crisp air. The trees loose their green uniforms to bright beautiful yellows and vintage dark reds. The grass sparkles in the mornings as light darts off the sheet of frost left by the night before. Spider webs look like they are made of glass because it has been decorated with dew overnight.

The English look better in autumn too. They swap their sun burnt and hay-fever-abused faces for more natural relaxed ones. They rid of their shorts and t-shirts for smart coats and jackets. Around their necks scarves cuddle them, making the English men and women look sharper and neater.

During November, wherever you look, you will notice, most of these smart English people will have a red poppy on them.

The red poppy of course, is the symbol for the charity that helps give support to those who have served for this country in the wars that have frequently populated our history, particularly the two big ones. We wear our poppies throughout the beginning of November, until the 11th, Remembrance Day.

We rightfully spend this day remembering those who lost their lives in the two darkest blotches in human history, the world wars.

I am writing about poppies and Remembrance Day, because it is more important now, more than ever to remind our selves of the horror mankind is capable of. Also, it is important to remember how the World Wars started.

We are now at point in time where there is a lot of uncertainty, greed and fear. And we have been at this very point before.

The Industrial Revolution in the 1800’s gave way to new power for western civilization. A spread of Exciting innovation across Europe meant that incredible new technologies were being made and changed society. Railways, factories, medicines and steam power, evolved us into giants. We could make more money more quickly than ever before. This is exactly like the later half of the 20th century, which we have just came out of. The later half of the 20th century has given us new technologies that have changed the way we think, communicate and make money. We are richer than ever before. But, just like during the industrial revolution, we have developed a culture of hyper-greed.

At the end of 1800s Europeans were hyper-greedy. Africa, a continent rich with recourses, but not as developed as the western world, became a hellhole as a result. With their newfound technologies Europeans exploited African’s that didn’t stand a chance against their steam power and weapons. They drove communities out and killed thousands, just so they could grab a piece of the recourse-rich lands. The giant Europeans began to slice Africa up between them. And soon, these giant European powers started squabbling over their empires, and eventually, we reached its climax of the devastating First World War.

The terrifying thing is, to get rid of this hyper-greed culture developed in those industrialized country’s, it took not just the atrocities and genocides in Africa to get rid of it, it took two, not one, two, world wars to stamp out the greed culture, and country’s eventually started to create social housing, welfare and national health service’s.

Today’s hyper greed culture is similar. People are willing to do unmoral things to gain more power. Our prime minister has just visited Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Eremites unashamedly to sell British weapons to their governments, despite both of these countries’ having disastrous human right violation records. Our top tax advisers in this country let already-powerful cooperation’s get away with paying menial taxes. We are willing to invade country’s that have oil recourses, like Iraq and Libya, but not willing to give military support to country’s that don’t, like Syria. Super richer banksters get away with nearly crashing the economy into the abyss, but disabled people suffer because of the cut down on welfare, to try and pull us out of the crisis.

Its not just at the top of our society the greed culture is thriving, it as at all levels of our society. People are more worried about being seen with the wrong mobile phone than supporting each other; look at the 2011 London riots.

With a hauntingly similar hyper-greed culture in society now as there was just before world war one, with a looming euro zone crisis that has been dealt with cruel austerity measures which are very similar to the measures used in Europe just before the second world war, and with ice cold nuclear weapon fears coming from Iran, we should step back and look at those little red poppies.

Remember what we are capable of.