Airport Etiquette

Customs, as we know, vary from country to country. One very British custom is queuing. People like to joke that we will join a queue even if we don't know what we are actually queuing for, so strong is the emphasis on waiting your turn.

I'm no different. I'm an inveterate queuer and a stickler for politeness, generally speaking. But this isn't always true of Belgians. Here, you must always be on the look-out in case you lose your turn. Nothing can be taken for granted.

I made the mistake of letting my guard down while waiting at Zaventem airport last week. On arrival, tired and dazed after a week of hell in Strasbourg, I joined the back of the line while my friend went to get us a much-needed coffee. On returning ten or fifteen minutes later she commented that I hadn't moved very far in that time. Indeed, on turning round, I discovered I was still very much at the back of the line.

The only thing was, though, that some Indian guys who had walked past five minutes or so before were spearheading a new tributary to the queue which had started from the other direction. I was in a hurry. I hesitated - should I, shouldn't I? Then thought what the hell and went to reclaim my 'rightful' place just behind them.

It caused uproar. I was shouted down by a Flemish gentleman about my lack of manners, and a couple of angry ladies who claimed my action was thoroughly unscrupulous. I tried to explain, in French, that the people I was standing behind had clearly arrived later and that, in the freeforall, the main queue - mine - had effectively been sidelined. Useless. Or perhaps that was my language skills. After a few minutes I decided just to keep silent and stand my ground.

On nearing the partitions for the checkout desk I was surprised by a sharp jab in the ribs. A Belgian couple behind me were clearly squaring up for a fight and before I knew it the man had lifted my suitcase clear over his trolley while his wife took great delight in placing it firmly in the middle of the concourse, at the end of the line. He didnt mince his words either, demanding i 'bouge mon cul' and other equally unflattering remarks.

To reinforce the point his wife then took hold of the trolley and proceeded to run over my foot in an effort to evict me bodily. Realising it was just creating more of a scene her husband took over the reins and shoved me a good four or five metres with it as I protested loudly.

Finally an airport worker came over and threatened to throw them both out the queue. In some ways I had won the argument. But I was very confused and upset.

My question, I suppose, is who was in the right? I wouldn't have asserted myself if I didnt feel I had a point. But then, what seems right and wrong and what are right and wrong are very different. If everyone else felt I had committed a fault, should I have accepted that was just and backed down? Or was I right to stand up to this situation?

Terrified of running into my fellow passengers, I spent some time hovering around the security gate before ducking into the plane at the last possible second. On emerging with my bags in Delhi - without further run-ins - I presumed myself safe.

But bizarrely, I did run into that ferocious couple again, this time 50k or so from the Tibetan border on Shimla's main street. This time, my partner had skipped the queue and - not recognising them - I pointed out they had been waiting before us. I couldn't work out the cold reception at first nor their certainty that I must be 'Belgian' (my accent being a dead giveaway). Maybe that was karma completed for this trip...

The Future: A Workerless World?

Apparently Jeremy Rifkin, the professor famous for predicting a Third Industrial Revolution on the back of Green Technology, has made one other prediction that kept rather more under wraps by our leaders. In the technological heaven that is the 21st century, he suggests, there won't be much work for human beings left to do since many of us will be replaced by robots.

Indeed, although"The global economy has never been more productive worldwide, unemployment is at its highest since the Great Depression. Out of 124 million American jobs, 90 million are potentially vulnerable to replacement by machines."

Now, as someone who values my leisure time that seems pretty good news at first sight, as it does to Professor Rifkin. Yet like labour-saving devices, feted in the 50s for giving us more free time away from chores but which simply give us more time to work, it seems this change could seriously back-fire on the human race.

Why? Well let me copy and paste Bob Black's critique of this theory:

Problem Number One: No Work; No Money; Huge Underclass

"As Rifkin reveals, the tech-driven downsizing of the workforce spares no sector of the economy. In the United States, originally a country of farmers, only 2.7% of the population works in agriculture, and here -- and everywhere -- "the end of outdoor agriculture" is foreseeable. The industrial sector was next. And now the tertiary sector, which had grown relative to the others, which is now by far the largest sector, is getting pared down. Automatic teller machines replace bank tellers. Middle management is dramatically diminished: the bosses relay their orders to the production workers directly, by computer, and monitor their compliance by computer too.
We approach what Bill Gates calls "frictionless capitalism": direct transactions between producers and consumers. Capitalism will eliminate the mercantile middlemen who created it.

In Proletarian Heaven, the handloom weavers must be snickering. What's wrong with this picture? Fundamentally this: the commodities so abundantly produced in an almost workerless economy have to be sold, but in order to be sold, they must be bought, and in order for them to be bought, consumers require the money to pay for them. They get most of that money as wages for working. Even Rifkin, who goes to great lengths not to sound radical, grudgingly admits that a certain Karl Marx came up with this notion of a crisis of capitalist overproduction relative to purchasing power"

Problem Number 2: The Fewer Workers, the More Stress - Both For Those With Jobs and Those Without

"Today we work longer hours than we did in 1948, although productivity has since then more than doubled. Instead of reducing hours, employers are reducing their fulltime workforces, intensifying exploitation and insecurity, while simultaneously maximizing the use of throwaway temp workers, momentarily mobilized reservists with little job security and lots of stress.

The work of the remaining workers, the knowledge-workers, is immensely stressful. Like text on a computer screen, it scrolls around inexorably, but for every worker who can't take it, there's another in "the new reserve army" of the unemployed (another borrowing from you-know-who) desperate to take her place. And the redundant majority is not just an insufficient market, it's a reservoir of despair.

Not only are people going to be poor, they're going to know that they're useless. What happened to the first victims of automation -- southern blacks displaced by agricultural technology ending up as a permanent underclass -- will happen to many millions of whites too. We know the consequences: crime, drugs, family breakdown, social decay. Controlling or, more realistically, containing them will be costly and difficult"

The Way Forward:

Jeremy Rifkin thinks that the only way out of this nightmare is getting the semi and unemployed to be paid in return for voluntary service. Community work. Cleaning Streets. Clearing woodland. Whatever you want to call it it is far from sitting on a beach with a pina colada, enjoying the benefits of not working. In fact his solution bears more than a passing ressemblance to slavery. Bizarrely Jeremy Rifkin thinks this is a great solution because - what would people do if they didnt work??

It is clear that, in this case, the Protestant Spirit and Work Ethic are coalescing seemlessly. Ask people in other countries - Italy, for example, where everything always seems to be closed, or our Mexican fisherman from the previous post - how they would live without work and they would tell you straight away: focus on their personal priorities. Work is created so we can pursue these - not so we can ignore them and plough on in 15 hours a day. Some poor souls have the misfortune to have badly paying jobs. In the past, it was they who worked hard to survive. These days, city bankers are as likely to slave away all the hours God sends - just to have their two weeks of leisure per years, sitting by the beach with their blackberries on standby.

Bob Black has a better idea. Get rid of the control element which underlines such ideas. Let people work fewer hours, let them job share, to give more people a chance to earn. Then we might all be happier.

Vive la France, Vive la semaines des 35 heures!

http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/critique.html

Why Work?

I get to the office pretty early in general, as I have to be there in time for an 8am morning meeting. This is not as early as the majority of my 'team' who, for reasons best known to themselves, like to get there around 7.30. Given the majority is still there at 7.30 at night I wonder how they manage their lives, relationships, shopping - even little things like ironing or going to the bank.

I'm not very good at living like this. For a start, I hate mornings. Always have. I can just about cope with starting up my brain around 10am but before that body and mind simply don't coalesce. Of course, I can't argue with the boss about coming in at this horrendous hour. But I don't have to be happy about it either. As far as I am concerned I work hard, and have to deal with a lot of stress as it is. Surely he should understand that I do this only under duress?

But no. Today I met him in the lift on the way to the meeting. He asked how I was and I said, 'fine thanks, but tired'. He stopped, turned around, and looked at me amazed saying 'how can you be tired. It's already 8am! You should start work earlier, you'll get more done". I didn't really know what to say (and was stifling irritation that I now appear lazy simply because I don't live in the office 24/7) but my real objection was this. Why do we always have to do more, more, more? What are we working for, exactly, that we have to dedicate ourselves body and soul to the cause?

It's not like we are at war, or in a national emergency or something. It's not even about short-term necessity. It's a chronic condition based on the assumption that nothing in life could be more important than work. And equally, that there is nothing worse in life than not working. That is why stay-at-home mums these days find themselves so isolated and lacking in self-worth and why the unemployed, or worse, beggars, are so stigmatised - even though full employment is no more than a pipe-dream for most countries.

I simply don't accept that this is the best way to live. However, I am clearly in the minority. Living to work is one of the great givens of the modern age. What we do, how much we earn, who we know - these are the keys to our identity and status. The private self, the domestic self has been essentially devalued. For me, this is the malaise of modern Europe - but one for which other world cultures still have the antidote. I'm always amazed how friends from other countries - particularly those in South Asia or the Middle East - think Europeans are oppressed. No time for leisure, for family, for contemplation, even to cook a proper meal or say hello to your neighbours they say. What kind of life is that?

I'm bound to agree. While I can't simply ignore my own culture and do things differently I would love to work part-time, do a bit of studying or volunteering, look after my kids and cook proper food. I would love to have a garden and grow my own veg. I would love to have the time and the energy to see family and friends without having to fit them into an already bulging Saturday full of household chores.

To illustrate the stupidity of our current situation I chanced on this amusing anecdote. Remember it next time you are tempted to take a high flying position with a 16 hour working day and no holidays.

The story, of unknown origin, goes something like this: An American investment banker, visiting a small village in Mexico, encounters a Mexican fisherman. The fisherman describes his life: "I sleep late, fish a little, take siesta with my wife, Maria, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos. I have a full and busy life."

The American scoffs at the fisherman’s lack of ambition and goes into great detail about how he could expand his small business and make millions. "Then what?" asks the fisherman."Then you would retire," replies the American. "Move to a small village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siesta with your wife, and stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play guitar with your amigos."

For more arguments along the same lines go to the website: http://www.whywork.org/

Just Ask Barbie...

I'm aware my last couple of posts have been a bit depressing. So I thought I would lighten the mood with some journalistic ineptitutude.

Now I know that MEPs aren't generally well known in their respective countries but I am surprised that those employed by the parliament don't seem to know who they are either.

(I definitely suffer from this problem: two women had plonked themselves at the table we'd reserved in a Thai place - one of my favourites - after a very long day at work. I asked my colleague, in a rather loud voice, what 'those girls' were doing there and shouldn't we ask them to leave: sadly for my career one of them turned out to be an MEP from my delegation...I guess it always pays to pay attention).

This months prize mix-ups are truly hilarious, stemming I think, from a combined ignorance of politicians AND the English language which is endemic in Brussels. I was reading the 'what's on' guide to the last session to see the Members' activities. And I discovered that Mary Lou 'Macdonalds' was giving a press conference on food safety. That made me laugh pretty hard. But it was nothing compared to "Barbie de Brun" leading toy safety campaigns.

I wonder what Sinn Fein's feisty Bairbre de Brun and Mary Lou McDonald would think of that.

But Shariasly

Two phrases that don't normally go together attracted my attention today: 'EPP Working Group' and 'Sharia in Europe'. But there it was, advertised on a poster in the main lobby as I dashed to a meeting of the - wait for it - Working Group on the Separation of Religion and Politics to discuss apostasy. What the bejeezus is going on?

Gone are the days when European Parliament debates ranged from the proper curve of cucumbers to distribution of structual funding in outlying regions of Greece. Religious issues are enjoying the kind of political currency in our corridors of power unheard of for most of the twentieth century. A fact which is used to further various political ends, bóth electoral and ideological.

Fearmongers from the left of the political spectrum warn of the retreat of secularism in Europe and the abandonment of our humanist heritage. Cultural relativism and weak defence of enlightenment values by government and the media, they claim, has resulted in the birth of new forms of totalitarianism whether in the guise of Islamic extremism or papish plots to ban abortion and demonise homosexuals.

For many MEPs, their aim - thinly veiled, if you'll excuse the pun - is to sideline the 'backward' forces of religion and promote their own aggressive brand of secular humanism. Abolition of religious education in schools, bans on religious symbols in public spaces, and an emphasis on civic ethics is their endgame, and one which exhibits as much exclusivity as your average religious fundamentalist.

On the other side of the bench, conservatives and ultra-nationalists point to the revival of 'Judeo-Christian ethics' - exemplified by the heated debate over the place of God in Europe's tentative Constitution and Polish attempts to put 'values' firmly back on the political agenda - as an example of the EU reclaiming its heritage from the mistakes of multiculturalism and liberal neutrality. In their version of reality immigration is responsible for the widely cited 'breakdown' in European society, providing a pretext to forcibly assimilate or deport non white citizens.

Both are allied against liberal apologists whose 'flabby' thinking is supposedly handing the field to Islamists prepared to misuse the discourse of human rights and religious freedoms to undermine the very values liberals seek to protect. In reality, of course, many critics of liberalism dislike the freedom from social conformity which is its corollary and are more than happy to seize on reasons for curtailing individual rights which they deem in opposition to necessary state control and surveillance.

In all versions, the demonised Muslim minority is used as a lever to force political change. So pervasive has the motif of mad mullahs on the streets of Europe become that the stereotype has been normalised - a fact which constitutes simply one more example of the mainstreaming of far-right policies in the political life of our continent which has taken on an increasingly xenophobic and nationalist streak.

Liberals, of course, are wrong not to condemn political islamists of the Hizb-ut-Tahrir persuasion and deserve all the pummelling they currently receive for lying down in the face of would be theocratic despots. Equally, their opponents are wrong to tar all Muslims with the same brush, By synthesising the programme of Political Islam with religion in the public mind, anyone who declares themselves to be a Muslim (whether Salafi, Reformist, or downright secular) is deemed a suspect, a traitor, and the antithesis of all things European.

Just yesterday two far-right politicians - Frank Vanhecke and Filip Dewinter of the Belgian Vlaams Belang - were arrested outside the European Commission for protesting against the Islamisation of Europe. Shouting 'No to Sharia Law' and 'Democracy Not Theocracy' supporters clashed with the police and bemused immigrants in the EU quarter of Brussels.

Their numbers may have been small - in the hundreds rather than thousands due to a ban on the grounds of maintaining public order issued by the mayor - but they hit the headlines big time. Not allowing them to demonstrate may prove a major mistake by the authorities as it rallied the supporters of free speech to the side of people who are fundamentally racist, misguided, or both.

What I saw in the parliament today did nothing to dissuade my fears for the future. It is time politicians and the media (who don't generally have strong theological backgrounds) started to put much greater distance between the jihadi rhetoric of extremist political groups and ordinary followers of the Islamic religion. Likewise, governments must have the guts to institute formal bans on all Islamist groups and their cover organisations which promote violence and undermine democracy. It is frankly outrageous that leading lights from organisations like the Hizb, having been expelled from Muslim countries, continue to enjoy the right to speak out against a Western way of life that they do not respect and in many cases wish to destroy. That way alone lies compromise and a return to a middle ground that too often seems to have been abandoned.