Introduction

I guess I should start with an explanation of the title of this blog. It's a quote from the movie Network when the disillusioned TV newcaster, Howard Beale, says to his audience:

'You've got to say, 'I'm a HUMAN BEING, Goddamnit! My life has VALUE!' So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell,
'I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!'

At 61 years old, I find myself feeling more and more like Howard Beale. I've tried writing to the Prime Minister and the newspapers, but it achieves nothing. If Tony Blair can ignore three million people marching against the war in Iraq, he certainly has no problem ignoring my emails, if he ever gets to see them at all.

So blogging seems to be a possible answer. I don't expect this to change things but I hope that it will strike a chord with others who feel the same way or, indeed, have opposite views, and from the resulting dialogue, maybe we can find our own way to relieve the frustration of being a member of a democracy where our view only counts on polling day, and then only in a handful of constituencies.

I plan to make this as wide ranging as I can but inevitably it will have a political bias and in my case a leftish political bias.

Right now, I'm het up about the changing face of capitalism and whether it really is the only way to run the world; the way politicians and big business are using global warming to score points without actually doing something positive to arrest it; about the increasing gap between rich and poor, in Britain as well as the wider world; about the blatantly unfair tax system that takes a greater percentage of income in tax from the poorest rather than the rich; about the fact that thousands of children in the Third World are dying each day for the lack of something as basic as clean water when millions of pounds are squandered on unnecessary luxuries in the West.

And today, I'm angry that the Roman Catholic church, with its disgraceful record of committing and covering up child abuse, has the temerity to say that being gay should exclude you from adopting children.

So that's it, I'm as mad as hell and I hope this blog provides a lot of people with a window where they can yell, I'm not going to take it any more.

Saltaire Sam