The Gratitude Police

Back in the 'good old days', before he existence of social media, we could all live our lives, blissfully unaware of the undercurrents of racism, misogyny and just good old plain hatred, that swirled just below the surface of our society.  Sure, you might overhear the odd remark in a pub, or on a radio phone in or even in the letters column of a newspaper, but you could always dismiss these as being the products of isolated bigots, nutters and cranks, unrepresentative of the overwhelming majority of people.  So we could continue our belief that we lived in a tolerant, even liberally minded society, inclusive of minorities and welcoming diversity.  Then along came social media, which gave a pretty much unfiltered platform to these bigots, nutters and cranks - to the extent that you started to worry that perhaps they weren't such an isolated minority, after all and that a lot of the population are, in fact, horrible bastards.  I mean, just look at some of the things that have been trending on Twitter over the past couple of days in relation to Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe since her release by Iran: #ungrateful, #unrgratefulcow and #sendherback, to name a few.  All because she has had the audacity to criticise the government for their handling of the issues which lay behind her incarceration by the Iranian government.  The racism and misogyny underpinning these trends is ugly and disturbing: non-white women should feel grateful that we even bothered with them, it seems to say.

Indeed, this whole expectation of 'gratitude' seems to be part of the populist right-wing mind-set stirred up those who backed Brexit.  The idea that we might help people for simply altruistic reasons seems alien to them - any act of kindness or, indeed, simple human decency,  should indebt the recipient in perpetuity, it seems.  In part, this seems driven by concepts of social class we really should have outgrown long ago - the less well off, the lower classes, should feel grateful for the help the wealthy condescend to give them.  This used to be expressed through the fact that the only relief they could obtain was via charity - your health care, education and so on were ultimately provided at the whim of the better off.  Of course, the welfare state was meant to end this, but successive Tory bastard governments have whittled away at the system, making benefits applicants increasingly jump through humiliating hoops to 'prove' that they should be paid the benefits they are entitled to.  (Moreover, the rising use of food banks indicates that charity is back in a big way as the main source of poverty relief - not that those bloody proles seem grateful, though).  Immigrants and refugees face similar attitudes - they should be grateful that we even pull them out of the water when their dinghy sinks in the Channel, for God's sake.  You can guarantee that it is only a matter of time before the gratitude police decide that those refugees from the war in Ukraine (if any of them ever really are allowed into the UK), just aren't grateful enough for our hospitality.

Depressing though it might be to see such attitudes on display in contemporary Britain, I take some solace from the fact that, thankfully, social media users aren't representative of the population at large.  As I've noted before, they are simply a very vocal minority who have learned how to manipulate a particular platform to create the impression that they represent some groundswell of public opinion.  That said, there are still more ignorant bigots out there than I'd like - cultivated and emboldened by our current ruling cabal.