A man on the radio said his mother was felled by a stroke. He phoned for an ambulance. It came three hours later. He had phoned for an ambulance when his father had a heart attack, thirty years before. The ambulance came in seventeen minutes.
The man wondered how that could be possible, given that the internet is now widespread, services are digitally connected and mobile phones are more or less universal in his locality.
That's progress, he said.
The proliferation of modern technologies was queried by a rail passenger, on a different radio programme. She still had the small cardboard ticket her grandfather used for a return journey from London Euston to Fintown, in the west Donegal Gaeltacht. He went to Euston Station, bought the ticket from a person at a ticket booth, received his small token of carriage, boarded trains that made good connections, crossed the Irish Sea by ferry, boarded more trains, enjoying further, straightforwardconnections and arrived safe and sound at his home place, Baile na Finne. He was able to make his emigrant’s return on the same ticket, just as seamlessly.
The woman explained that she could not make such a journey now. There is no train from Fintown, with onward rail and sea connections to Euston. There are buses, each ticketed separated, so she would end up with a sheaf of paper or a mix of paper and digital imprints on her mobile phone (which she would have to keep charged and linked to the internet, should she have a problem). The days of the tidy through-ticket are over.
That’s progress, she said.
The local pub shows English and European soccer games. Sometimes the pub is crowded, mainly with younger men, present to have a drink and take in the game. Many of them do not watch the screens, ranged on the walls. They watch the screens on their phones, not to view the action of the players, but to monitor the progress of their bets. The bets are placed on all manner of wagers: who will score first? who will get the first corner? will the game end in a score draw? The players are not athletes or sports-people. They are gamblers. Sometimes the wagers are combined into complex multipliers and combinations, building a tower of risk and doubt that topples like a gangly jenga.
That’s progress, the on-line bookmaker said.
Universal credit, cut by £20 a week in October, will rise by just 3.1 per cent, while inflation could soon exceed 8 per cent. Households will be around £1100 worse off over the coming year. (The average annual spend on groceries is more than £1300 per person, so those living on the poverty line will effectively have their food budget wiped out.) An additional 1.3 million people, including half a million children, will be tipped into absolute poverty as their household incomes sink below 60 per cent of the 2011 median.
A cost-of-living advisor said that our homes are full of vampire devices, which gobble the life-blood of our incomes by sucking electricity into themselves, even when they are not in use. “Stand by” mode is gobble-juice mode. Radios, tvs, microwaves, Alexas, computers and every other domestic power-user wastes energy and costs money just by being ready and convenient. There are many more such vampires in the home and the urge to have more is fuelled by advertisers daily. Our houses are Transylvania crammed with Draculas, hungry for electrical juice.
That’s progress, the advisor said.
Apples are up by 25 per cent, margarine by 31 per cent, milk by 7 per cent. Food is more expensive and people have less to spend. Food bank users are turning down rice and pasta because of the cost of boiling a pan of water. Worse is to come. Ammonium nitrate fertiliser has risen from £280 to £1000 a tonne in the last year, reflecting the increased cost of the energy required to produce it. Crop yields will suffer, and food prices will continue to rise.
In wealthy Western countries, hospitals have less beds, doctors and nurses. Food banks proliferate. High street banks cut opening hours, further dehumanising financial transactions between people. People who want to use cash are nicknamed recalcitrants, Luddites, un-modern.
That’s progress, the banker said.
The UK government has responded by lifting the energy price cap by 54 per cent, protecting companies from taking the hit despite the fact that the Big Six – British Gas, EDF, E.ON, npower, Scottish Power and SSE – have made £7 billion in profit over the last five years. With the new cap in place, household fuel bills will rise by £700 over the course of the year.
That’s progress, radio listeners said.
Rebecca Solnit writes: Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal. To hope is to give yourself to the future – and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.
Quotes from What it Costs to Live
Arianne Shahvisi, London Review of Books, 21.4.2022
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n08/arianne-shahvisi/what-it-costs-to-live
Hope In The Dark, book, Rebecca Solnit, Haymarket Books, Chicago, 2010.
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