From our June 5th edition
You can’t keep everyone happy. That’s one of those sweeping generalisations that holds more than just an element of truth in it.
Ask any politician or local councillor, any teacher or football coach, and they might even go further and say it is an impossibility to keep everyone happy.
People have different expectations and while some are happy to allow for a deal of leeway when it comes to those expectations being met, others can see things only the way they think things should be and make no allowances for anyone.
Imagine though if that was the way we lived our family lives. Each individual in the house expecting their needs to be met and to hang with everyone else’s. It would be chaos.
Can you imagine the fights over the remote control and what should be watched on television? Children would never learn to share but would grow up expecting to have and to do what they wanted all the time.
More importantly they would never know the security and freedom that comes from having boundaries.
Mealtimes would be mayhem, trying to cater for everyone’s likes and dislikes at whatever time of day or night they wanted to eat. Trying to live within a budget would be a nightmare with everyone vying for the things they wanted the household money to be spent on. And who would do the things no one really wants to do, like clean the bathroom or put out the bins?
The daily reality of family life is that we live with compromise and negotiation because that’s the only way we can actually live together.
Surely the same has to be true in our social interaction on a community level. We might feel passionately about the needs of younger people, but we can’t hope to meet their needs to the exclusion of everyone else’s. We might want pensions to be increased to give security to older people as they age, but we can’t forget that families too need help with current incomes of working people leaving many below the breadline.
Neither can we forget about people living with different abilities who need support – or a health or an education service that is being stretched to its limits.
I know it’s a case of prioritising, but what is at the top of the list for one person may be only halfway down someone else’s list or it might not make other people’s lists at all.
When we stop bothering about taking other people and their views into account, we become less human because humans are designed to live in communities.
That doesn’t make life any easier but it reminds us that (and here comes another of those sweeping generalisations) no man or woman is an island. If we could live in the plural thinking about “us” instead of “me” then not only would our communities and nation be better places, but the whole of the world could be together and, dare I say it, we’d be edging that much closer to keeping everyone happy – Susan Brown.
