How many of us blindly follow the prevailing fashions?

This week's column in The Kerryman newspaper.

Michael Commane

Over the weekend I visited three people, two with developed stages of dementia and one with a brain tumour.

It depressed and shocked me; I have known two of the people ever before they were struck down with dementia and I know the other person since she was first diagnosed with cancer.

The experience forced me to ask what is it all about. It selfishly prompted me to ask myself how will I end up. 

We prance about thinking we are invincible; at the blink of an eye we can be struck down in myriad ways. We never know what’s around the corner. 

The new school term has begun, I’ve done my first few days of teaching post primary students. It’s most unlikely the ideas I am expressing here cross the students’ minds, that is, unless, they have had to deal with tragedy in their own lives. And at this age most of them have fortunately been spared the vagaries of life.

Why am I being so despondent, maybe even dark?

By chance on Saturday I watched something on YouTube that set my mind in a downward spiral; something that is forever haunting me. It was an interview with Markus Wolf. 

I imagine most readers have never heard of him; he was the chief spymaster in the former German Democratic Republic, better known to us as East Germany. The interview took place in 1990. 

He comes across as an intelligent, articulate, urbane man, whom I can imagine was a loving father and husband, though he did have three wives, not at the same time. 

He was enemy number one to the western world and feared and hated in his own country. Wolf was at the top of the hated East German secret service, known as the Stasi.

I recommend you watch it on YouTube, you can pull down the English subtitles.

John Banville once said that if he had his way he would remove the word evil from the dictionary and replace it with circumstance. How many people we know in management jobs, whether in private industry, state companies, the church, could as easily have found themselves working in similar jobs in Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, Mao Zedong’s China? What would I have done? I think my incompetency would have made me a non-runner from day one; otherwise, I’m scared to think about it.

It’s not just in areas of health that we are fragile, surely that word fragility, maybe circumstances, cuts right across our lives from the day we are born until the moment of our death.

Just think of our school system and the race to score high in the world of CAO points. Our postcode plays a major role; just check the results from the various schools and it’s game set and match who wins and who loses.

And that’s part of the story that keeps me on my toes, even wondering how do we form moral opinions, how do we really decide what is right and wrong. 

How many of us simply follow the prevailing fashions, run along with the crowd. Do we all simply feel comfortable in our own particular bubble?

Whatever about Markus Wolf, who am I? Who are you?