It is not as though any of this has taken place overnight. Is it pride, hubris, vanity, that has encouraged almost all of us to stand, drooling with impotence, over a period of decades?

In future recorded history, there will be a void where our generations should have been. We will be the unmentionables, the basis of curses upon one’s enemies: ‘May you be despised as much as the Voided!”

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

John Adams

I know this sounds a bit off topic, but the One & Only and I (currently in quarantine) have been watching the old ‘Bodyline’ TV series. Jardine took umbrage at the accusation of ‘unsportsman like’ behaviour in his bowling attack and always insisted that it was all done within the rules of the game.

But like Adams quote, above, the rules of cricket were made for a certain sort of people, with particular moral and sportsmanship ideals. Jardine did ‘play within the rules’ because the rules didn’t consider someone who would be more intent on winning than upholding the ideals of the game.

In the West our rules and laws had been made for a moral and religious (specifically Christian) people. Not that everyone was either moral or Christian, but they respected the values and sentiments of such.

Well, there were people who were happy to exploit the freedoms imbedded in those laws to bring about such a change that those very freedoms were the target of their anti-moral-and-religious new world.

The Bodyline series changed the nature of cricket, not because Jardine was a lone warrior, but because he personified the change that was taking place in the wider community.

A worldview never stays just in the mind. It comes out your fingertips and works its way through the whole culture and society.

Which is a long-winded way of saying, unless we become that ‘moral and religious people’ again – we’re stuffed.