IN HIS amusing article on TCW on Thursday, Daniel Jupp asked: Is your granny right-wing?
He was picking up on a not-so-amusing rambling article in the Guardian headlined: ‘I feel like I’m losing her’: the families torn apart by older relatives going far right. The article implied that older people are spending so much time reading about or listening to baseless conspiracy theories that they aren’t so much far right as far gone, and as a result younger relatives can no longer engage with them. Instead, they shut off when the befuddled old dears start expressing beliefs that covid was a hoax, that immigration is out of control and that Tommy Robinson is right.
The conclusion was that these older people have lost the ability to think critically and are probably in need of therapy to correct the misinformation they have gleaned from spending too many hours imbibing rubbish online.
There was never a suggestion in the Guardian article that younger people might actually learn something if they listened to their unorthodox grannies instead of sighing and asking if they might like a nice cup of tea rather than ranting on about Starmer and Muslims. As one such granny, I have to say in our defence that we haven’t just taken everything we hear or read at face value but have looked at all sides until we can form our own opinion – and risk being abused and patronised for doing so.
Sadly, it’s not just the youngsters who refuse to listen to those of us who have seen through to the truth in the last few years. It’s our own generation as well.
Only the other day I was at a restaurant with a group of very old friends. We have known each other since our early twenties and have all gone through the mill: careers, children, marriages, divorces, deaths, the lot. We are battle-scarred but just about surviving. We see each other rarely these days and one might imagine that when we meet, we might want to exchange views on serious subjects.
Not a bit of it. When I mentioned Trump and started to say that I thought he was doing a good job, the one grandpa in the group put up his hand and said, ‘No Trump talk today.’ The others nodded. Instead of discussing current concerns, all they wanted to do was to share snaps of their cute grandchildren.
I tried again by telling them that I had received yet another text to come for ‘my’ covid jab but of course I had no intention of going, but the only response from somebody staring hard at the menu was, ‘I’m having the cheese omelette: what about you?’ None of them was willing to enter into a debate on the insanity of continuing to offer covid jabs six years later, or, God forbid, the ever-accumulating evidence of the great harm that these jabs have done.
This is not my first experience of people of my vintage shutting down conversation when it veers towards important issues. You start saying that climate change is a con and instead of the topic being picked up are asked: ‘Do you have any plans for a holiday this year?’
Others of my persuasion have found the same, even our own Kathy Gyngell, founder and editor of TCW. When I mentioned that I am constantly being silenced if I try to voice my take on crucial matters of the day, she said: ‘This is my experience exactly. I am not just shut down, but I self-censor. TCW with my family and contacts (beyond my sons) is a non-topic. They pretend I don’t do it and I am an embarrassment to them.’
Never mind that Kathy and her team have had the bravery to post hundreds of authoritative articles challenging government, Big Pharma, the World Health Organization and other institutions whose main function seems to be to pull the wool over our eyes.
Another friend, one who has seen the light, has some relatives staying with her. She says that if she tries to involve them in a discussion on climate change, assisted dying, immigration or any other topic which should be concerning us all, she is told in no uncertain terms: ‘Do you mind? We just want to enjoy life.’
The ‘right-wing’ grannies and grandpas who have closely studied these issues should be hailed as insightful individuals who have been curious enough to look behind the headlines to try to discover what is really going on, rather than being dismissed as confused old biddies who are most probably suffering from early dementia.
We don’t necessarily believe, for instance, that the almost- centenarian David Attenborough is the saintly national treasure that has been made out, but you try saying this in polite company. In earlier times you would probably have been burned at the stake for heresy.
The Guardian article reckons that we maverick older people have lost the ability to think critically, but au contraire, we are the ones who have sharpened our critical faculties, particularly over the last six years.
Yet finding like-minded, awake people in whichever circle we might move in is not easy. Therefore, as our own friends and family won’t listen to us, we have to try to find groups that will. The friend I mentioned earlier has joined such a group. Her ‘tribe’, as she calls them, are informed people who meet in pubs and who will lend a listening ear and take on board what she has to say.
But this tribe won’t go into just any old pub. They will only frequent taverns that take cash. Otherwise, in protest, they walk out. They also use only cash in supermarkets and other stores, literally putting their money where their mouth is. Are younger people trying to keep cash alive? I doubt it. Mostly, they haven’t even given a second thought to what a cashless society might mean for all of us.
I also belong to a semi-secret group of people on my wavelength who meet from time to time. They are not exactly in my ‘circle’, as apart from these meetings I hardly know them, but it is a relief to be able to chat with people who have done their research, dug deep into controversial subjects and come up with sound, if uncomfortable, answers. We have arrived at the truth by a painful process of questioning everything we have been taught and trying to pinpoint the lies and falsehoods.
Because of this, we are increasingly feeling that there is not a lot of point spending time with those who only want to chat about trivialities. The old saying that there are none so deaf as those who don’t want to hear is very apt. We shall be gone soon, and what sort of legacy are we going to leave? We can only hope that by some gradual form of osmosis, and by refusing to be shut up, the truth will eventually seep out and the closed minds will open.
