Normal Distorted

We live in a hyperPC (politically correct) world where we are all afraid of causing offence to one or other minority group by speaking out of turn. The media is fired up to seize on any example and balloon it into yet another demonstration of prejudice / victimisation / social discrimination with all the hullabaloo that follows. Quite right too, we all have the greatest sympathy for the oppressed or abused and willingly offer compassion to the underdog.

My problem is that by constant headlining of the trials and travails of these minorities distorts our sense of the normal. Whether it is single mums, gay partners wanting a child, disabled access, religious rites, whatever the subject the focus on their rights and proper concerns creates the impression that this is a concern for all of our society. No it is not! It is not 'normal' to be a single mum and raise children on your own. They are a minority group. The media may choose to focus on single mums for the instant high emotive appeal and easy message they make. But that creates a distorted view. The majority normal group are couples raising a family under one roof. That should be our datum of judgement and expectation. Not the travails of the single parent. Sure, some single mums are truly victims and deserve all our support but not all. Some just choose to be single for thin reasons and all the barriers should not be thrown down to help them. Our perspective that we use to for judgements should be firmly and squarely founded on the 'normal'. If the minority position overshadows and clouds our judgement we cannot come to a proper balanced view.

Gay couples, or if it comes to that post menstrual women or mid-career women coming late to conception are rich media targets to explain and justify high-tech solutions to creating new babies. But this is not the normal process. The normal way as used by the majority of adults seeking, or even just ending up with, babies, is do it the routine old-fashioned way. No scientific technology required, other than perhaps to defer the chance of success. In a world where there are just too many people having too many babies and where there are way too many babies dying for simple wants, or just as bad, babies growing up bereft of any hope of escape from intolerable conditions, why do we resort to scientific techniques to create even more? Understandably there is the scientific desire to advance our understanding and increase our skills in solving our human condition, but is that sufficient justification? Or is it driven by a selfish egoism craving for that trophy child that solidifies your status in society? By over-focussing on these minorities concerns we lose perspective and fail to consider the broader and more fundamental platform of that of the normal majority. We should be challenging the scientists right to use their ever sophisticated techniques, we should unite and focus their attention where the real creation issues are. The normal majority are getting on with it just fine.

On another tack we are a Christian based society. The overwhelming number of us subscribe to the Christian codes of conduct and moral standards. No longer are most of us practising Christian, going to church with any frequency, but the Christian background as to how our society holds together is deeply rooted in each of us. Part of that Christian background is the requirement within each of us to be tolerant and supportive of other faiths. Supportive in the narrow sense of not hindering rituals and practises of another faith but not to the extent of proactively promoting another faith. That clearly is for them. However if we take these rituals and customs of minority group faiths out of context, a minority group, and elevate each travail and setback as a challenge to the majority Christian society we again are getting the perspective out of kilter again. We are hosts to a wide range of people with a wide range of minority religious beliefs, whether Greek Orthodoxy, Jews, Seven Day Evangelist's, Muslim, Buddhist, it matters not, our duty as the host society is to be tolerant and accommodating of rituals which may appear as strange and out of place. Certainly there should be no discrimination based on a different religious belief. As guests within a host society it befalls on them as guest to constrain their beliefs and rituals, to go out and discover which of their practise cause the most unease amongst their hosts and find ways to tone it down or explain it so as to minimise the chance of causing upset. It is not for the host to set aside the majority position just to let a minority group carry on doing as it wishes regardless. If your religion requires the ritual killing of an animal, if your religion requires your girls to be genitally mutilated or submit to an arranged marriage, if your religion requires compliance with Sharia Law or your religion requires a full burka, don't expect your hosts to set aside their objectives of a free open society where women and men both have opportunities to succeed. You as a minority group in a society will have to defer to the majority expectations in the full knowledge that your desires will be met with tolerance and goodwill.

Just one final note of despair. In bald terms 20% of our populations are disabled in some degree or other and only 1% of out population are wheelchair disabled. A pretty small number, 1% against 99%, right. Disabled toilets are designed around the needs of wheelchair users as defined by the gold standard reference. Selwyn Goldsmiths 'Designing for the Disabled'. The author goes to considerable lengths to emphasis that each disabled person requirements are different and that there is no one suit all arrangement. Behold the Building Regulations lay down standardised disable toilet arrangements that are deemed to suit. Sense the irony? Of course disabled people should not be discriminated against and should be free to travel and move around freely without constraint. To counter discrimination there is a legal requirement that premises open to the public shall provide wheelchair suitable toilet facilities. That speaks for the 1%. The 99% other people also have a right to move around without constraint. The toilet they most frequently encounter in all the shops and public spaces, apart from the very few municipal conveniences left, will be designed for wheelchair disabled use. A toilet which will not suit many of the wheelchair users it is supposed to be designed to help. Wide open out doors. Extra space for a person to stand beside the wheelchair, space to side transfer from chair to seat. Hand holds, alarms, seat height heights, elbow action taps, basin and mirror height accessible from chair. Cosy for those wheelchair users that just happen to have the right handicap to suit that particular arrangement. As a member of the 18% or so of the elderly population I can confirm that the ability to hold on until a suitable public toilet can be located diminishes with age and begins to become critical. We have urgent needs to be met. Not to wait in a queue until the one oversized, occupying the space for at least two cubicles, unisex facility is free. There to be confronted with appliances set too low at that risk back damage from stooping, or fumbling with flimsy elbow fittings or even worse a toilet out of commission because the disabled friendly levers and handles just cannot cope with high public usage. It is ended up all-about-face. The majority, the normal person on the street has to accepted compromised facilities which are slewed to suit the needs of a very small minority of users.

A wide range of high principled objectives have resulted in completely distorting the wide spread recognition of what it is to be normal within the broadband of the majority. The majority now identify themselves from the narrow perspective of the small minority groups point of view. It is all an Alice in Wonderland distortion.