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The Cedars of Lebanon

The Big Problem

Pollyanna Meets Captain Kirk

Does God Bless America?

Ticket Touts

Military Salute

Paedophilia is Not a Crime

Kill the puppy dogs

Is sex with animals always wrong?

Religious indoctrination is child abuse

Respecting God

England is going to the dogs. They all say it. They've been saying it for hundreds of years.

As long as I can remember people have been complaining that the country is in free-fall and they'd be better off living somewhere else. Yet somehow most of us are still here and things are looking OK as far as I can see.

Why do people feel the need to tell everybody about it? If you want to go just go. Goodbye, send us a postcard if you want but for pity's sake stop bellyaching about it all the time. I'm not going anywhere and I don't want to hear your justifications, if they are not strong enough to have made you go up to now why do you keep airing them?

Drugs and crime. That seems to be the problem cited by so many emigrants in their thirties. What? Crime? You think it's a good idea to leave the suburbs of Manchester and go and live in Spain because there's so much crime in Britain. There isn't. Crime is significantly lower than it was several years ago and one of the reasons is that so many British criminals are now living in Spain. I remember clearly ten or fifteen years ago burglary and car theft was a significant problem, people were getting burgled and having cars stolen and I knew about it because people told me it happened to them. Now it only happens in the newspapers. But people tell me about it happening, they read it in the newspaper.

There is also the “epidemic of guns” that is “sweeping” through British cities. I've never seen or heard a gun fired by a criminal in Britain in over forty years experience, but I did hear gunshots when I was in an American city. For every day I have been in America I have spent more than 175 in Britain.

Is the drive to move on to somewhere new built into us such that a proportion of us will always want to seek out new pastures? I think there is a strong possibility that this is the case. Think about Ireland, it has been exporting its population for centuries. There are now far more people of Irish descent living outside Ireland than live there. But still there are people in Ireland and the dogs haven't taken over.

The most effective way of spreading people across the planet would be to have an urge to wander crop up in a minority of people in every generation regardless of the true standard of living along with a minority who don't want to move regardless of what happens. That will result automatically in a constant gentle pressure to spread out, to populate new areas, to mix up the genes and at the same time to hang on to established homelands. In my own family I can see evidence that backs up this theory. My father is living literally a stone's throw from the house he was born in. He has a brother living in Germany. My mother is living near her childhood home, her brother in it (he never left it for more than a few weeks in over sixty years) and the other one lives in Canada, he emigrated shortly after getting married. In the previous generation my paternal grandfather stayed close by home all his life while my maternal grandfather spent several years in Canada mining silver before returning home to buy a milk round and then a dairy farm. A half brother of my grandfather popped out to buy 5 Woodbines and caught a ship to Canada, whether he had a ticket might depend on who was telling the tale.

No matter how home-loving, stranger-fearing and inbred a community is surely virtually everybody on the planet is descended from some ancestors who left home and sought out a new place to live at some stage.

Whilst the urge to emigrate exists in all populations it doesn't always manifest itself to the same level. One reason is rather obvious, it is difficult to find fault in paradise, but I have no doubt that people always will. Whilst America is drawing in migrants from all over the world Americans are also leaving to live elsewhere. The UK media is awash with people with American accents who have left America to find a better life in Britain, at least a life that better suits their way of thinking and living. As well as the idea that every plumber in Britain now is Polish is the other idea that it is compulsory to have at least one Australian serving behind the bar in every pub in Britain.

The future undoubtedly will be mixed up. Freedom of movement across the European Union will result in people moving more often. They will earn their money in Britain or Germany (or let their appreciating property portfolio do it for them) and then migrate to Spain, or rural France or Italy to live in their fifties and sixties before returning home to die close by their families or at least near high quality free hospitals. In a few years time maybe Bulgaria will be the chosen location where the weather is fine and the cost of living is cheap. It starts with holiday homes and it can evolve from there.

The pattern of migration is changing. Fifty years ago men left the Caribbean islands to come to work in Britain with every intention of returning home with money in a few years time, but in most cases they didn't. Today the men and women coming in to ease Britain's labour shortage, mostly Poles, really do seem to be sticking with Plan A and returning home once they have built up some savings. This could be the new way that people live in the future, many people on the move, not staying in the same place all their lives but neither cutting their ties to their roots.

One thing we can be sure of in the future there will be no emigration to virgin lands because there are none, but then again there hadn't been any for about a thousand years anyway. Man has retreated, we now no longer live on many islands and barren windswept hillsides where man had lived for many years. If people want to go to foreign lands now they have to want to and live among foreign people. I predict that a minority will do so just as they always have done.

© 1999 - 2008 by Martin Willett.

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