Outside Looking In

Andrew Wyeth: Christina's World

Outsider, definition: one not involved with a particular group of people or organization, one who does not live in a particular place; in addition, a person not liked or accepted as a member of any of these entities who feels different from those who are accepted as members.

I’m one of those outsider types by virtue of both birth and temperament. Born into a working class family where money was scarce,  in school I located myself at the margins. My clothing wasn’t right, my hair looked funny, my mother forbade me to shave my legs. I kept aloof,  a sense of not having what it takes pushing me to the edge. The girls who made decisions about who’s in and who’s out were like Penny, she of the pin-curled sandy hair and patterned polyester blouse that matched her ironed skirt. Or Liz , who smiled for no reason and laughed for even less. Boys came to her unbidden, and Johnny Palmeri cracked my heart as he danced off with her to the cafeteria. Oh the pain of not being pretty.

As if not being pretty weren’t enough,  I was smart, really smart. I understood concepts quickly, grasped abstract notions easily, wrote well. Maths were a weak spot, but in other areas of learning, I excelled. What a trial to be smart, another separation from any sense of belonging. Back in the day, being smart was not something a girl  would be proud of, let alone display. It would get in the way of her femininity, her desirability, any chance of making a happy family life (the alternative of a satisfactory life alone was near unthinkable unless you were immune to the disdain in the word ‘spinster.’)

Writing this now, I could be describing a Martian landscape where the inhabitants look like petrol pumps and have as many thoughts. Nineteen fifties social expectations limited the idea of what it means to be a woman, let alone vaguely consider that one may choose to identify as non-binary and hence neither female nor male. So it was that smart, unpretty me struggled to feel part of something beyond an unhappy childhood home and a working class neighborhood devoid of intellectual stimulation. My grandfather was the only one with a sense of what might be lurking inside my ten year old awkward self. ‘Colour outside the lines’, he told me, ‘don’t copy what others do.’

Much of my life energy is in the service of engaging my intellect but still colouring outside the lines. The view from the margins offers insights  obscured and dismissed by occupants of the solid middle. The danger is veering too far off course, to either left or right. The outsider can lose her way. Depression for women; violence for men. Panic attacks for me. For along with intellect, my outsiderness is fed by intense sensitivity to what I perceive as reality.

The positive side is an ability to read others quickly and understand intuitively; to grasp nuances of literature and social thought; to hold onto contradictory ideas and not insist they are reconcilable. The downside is an over-reaction: to people, to ideas, to any kind of stimuli. The sensitivity that opens so many doors is the same trait which shuts me off from other people, other ideas. In defending my intellect, the sensitive me risks curtailing openness and encouraging my own self-righteousness.

Conversation: Snow White’s wicked stepmother peering into her looking glass: Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the prettiest one of all?

Rose looking into her reflection: Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the smartest one of all?

Woe betide anyone with the wrong answer, even if the responder is my dearly beloved life-partner who continually challenges my insistence that I’m right. We embody contradictions in our pairing of Scottish engineer with Jewish intellectual. Often I’m distressed when he doesn’t understand what my smart, sensitive self discerns to be an absolute truth. He’s upset because I don’t hew to his rational, more accepting world view. His far more benign world view can balance my impassioned views --when it’s not another occasion for my outrage at his lack of understanding.

The internal battle of being an Outsider who still wishes to connect and to have an impact continues. The reward for the struggle comes in those moments of clarity when I’m pretty sure I’ve got it right-- mostly through words.

Rose Levinson

That it should come to this

Human history, according to some historians and philosophers, is driven by an innately

progressive force, be that [a] god in society, the random, ever-increasing cleverness of

human beings or, as social Darwinists would argue, a direction-driven social evolution

mysteriously equivalent to natural selection in biological inheritance. But just take a look at the twenty-first century: reality only seems to prove the falsehood of these notions.

Despite initial optimism (remember the Dome?!), the century began portentously with 9/11, swiftly followed by punitive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, themselves in turn precipitating more terrorism, only to be followed by catastrophe of a different sort, the collapse of banking systems around the globe. The century’s first decade saw nothing but waves of militaristic action and economic chaos, none of them progressive in any positive sense. And so it has continued.

In the UK, the eviscerating force of austerity is contributing to this global, societal regression in its own, inimitable, way. The welfare state, conceived initially in the dark days of the second world war, is crumbling. Its progenitors, William Beveridge (the economist whose brainchild it was) and Clement Attlee (the prime minister who was daring enough to introduce it) would be appalled to see the damage wrought in this new century.

Beveridge’s five giants of want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness (the enemies that the welfare state was designed to overthrow) are now clawing their way back into the ascendant. Under austerity, public spending is now seen as an evil rather than a good and, month by month, reports are published evidencing the collapse of one form of welfare provision or social regulation after another.

Huge swathes of workers face impoverishment as they find themselves forced into reliance on the gig-economy and other dead-end forms of pseudo employment. Universal credit (supposedly intended to ‘make work pay’) is condemning more and more people, in work or not, into debilitating debt. Other welfare benefits have been frozen and disabled people are stripped of their benefits for ‘not being disabled enough’ despite their patent inability to walk, see or make decisions.

Councils are barely able to build ‘affordable’ housing anymore and there has been a reversal in a fifty-year trend towards home ownership. Instead we see the return of pricey private sector renting and a dramatic rise in the number of homeless people, often sleeping on the streets in penury. Families are too often at the mercy of ruthless slum landlords, forced to live in cramped, damp accommodation, materially and intellectually impoverished. When families break down, children are taken into care and moved from one residential home or foster home to another, often miles away from their place of origin, directly because local- based public provision has been scaled down through lack of funding.

In education, the scale of decline is much the same: budgets are pinched, the quality of

education reduced. Increasing numbers of children, excluded from schools which are no

longer able to cope, are kept isolated in remedial facilities, or worse still, left to roam the

streets, ignored, untutored and neglected.

The NHS, the ‘jewel in the crown’ of the welfare state, tritely named but popularly

esteemed, is on the point of collapse. Mental health services, regularly given rhetorical

priority by ministers, are underfunded and neglected. Primary care is collapsing and more and more services are being outsourced to an expensive private sector which sees profit as its main reason for being in business. Waiting times, treatment and outcome rates for cancer and other serious conditions continue to deteriorate in comparison with those in other countries.

Turn to ‘crime and punishment’ and the story of decline and failure is the same. Police

officer numbers have been slashed, criminal offences once recorded are no longer

investigated. Probation services, whose aim is to prevent or rehabilitate, have deteriorated to a point where they cause more harm than good to the offenders for whom they are responsible, while reports by government prison inspectors warn that jails across the country are at the point of exploding into violence. Huge financial cuts mean that behaviour management and prisoner education have become forgotten ambitions. New generations of damaged individuals are disgorged back into the community, a greater threat now than before to both themselves and others.

And now we are faced with Brexit, the outcome of disastrous political miscalculation,

prompted wholly by internal party political conflict, rather than by any concern for the

wellbeing of citizens, a process which is about to lead to further political, social and

economic chaos. Pro-Brexit politicians speak blithely (and, sadly, persuasively) of “taking

back control” without a thought of its consequences. While Brexit may not be the cause of the austerity which the UK has been experiencing, it certainly has not prevented it. As the date for departure from the European Union approaches, the chaos simply grows, while hope declines in direct proportion to our realisation of the scale of the oncoming disaster.

Gillian Dalley

Climate Breakdown

These pictures are from a demonstration at London's British Broadcasting Corporation headquarters organized by Extinction Rebellion which I attended. XR is a grassroots group with two million members globally and growing. XR 'gets' climate change, unafraid to confront the harsh truth that the Earth is perilously close to uninhabitablity.

The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) gives us 12 years to make the drastic turn-arounds needed if we are not to suffer even more catastrophic social disruptions (like migration as in California's recent wildfires and war as in Syria where non-arable land displacement has driven conflict (cartoon here). Most sobering: the possibility of species extinction is real; humankind has been on this old Earth for a fraction of a second in the scheme of things.  Our very continuity is an open question.

See the New York Times article on what it might mean for us to go extinct.

Emerging Voices wants to start a conversation around our species threatening climate conditions. We invite you to be in touch with your ideas.

editors@emergingvoices.co.uk

Rose Levinson, December 2018