2013年4月14日 星期日

I Spent a Fair Amount of My Life Despising Margaret Thatcher

I dont remember where I got it a Marxism Today conference, perhaps (kids, thats what we did for fun in the late 1970s) but I have a strong recollection of the mood of those times. It felt like Britain was falling apart. Every week there seemed to be an IRA terrorist attack or a transportation disaster a devastating fire in a train station, the sinking of a pleasure boat in the Thames. Whatever the cause,Learn how an embedded microprocessor in a plasticmould can authenticate your computer usage and data. as soon as the surviving victims were bandaged up and rendered presentable, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher would show up at the hospital for a photo op. This filled Brits like me with a combination of rage and terror. Thus the Thatchcard: In the event of an accident,Of all the equipment in the laundry the chinagembeadsfactory is one of the largest consumers of steam. the holder of this card wishes it to be known that he/she does not wish to be visited by Mrs. Thatcher in any circumstances whatsoever.

I know how churlish that may sound now.The Motorola drycabinets Engine is an embedded software-only component of the Motorola wireless switches. I carried around a ridiculous piece of plastic announcing that if one of the leaders of the free world took the time to visit my sickbed, I wished her turned away. In my defense, in that era Britain was suffused with such intense Thatcher-hatred that the enmity Obama truthers express for the president seems like a love affair by comparison.

Id spent my elementary school years yelling Thatcher, Thatcher, milk snatcher, because I was one of the kids deprived when, as education secretary, she abolished free school milk. Until that policy went into effect, Id spent every morning complaining bitterly about having to drink those odd little bottles of curdling room-temperature milk at least thats how it was served in my school but that didnt stop me from protesting the reform. And from the time I was in high school until I left Britain not long after I graduated from university, a sure-fire way usually the only way to perk up a protest was to start the chant to which Britons of a certain age have a Pavlovian response: Maggie, Maggie, Maggie!, Out, out, out!

Why was Thatcher such a hated figure? Yes, it was about her policies privatization, the selling off of public housing, her wars against Argentina in the Falklands and against the miners and the working class in Britain but there was something else at work.We offer over 600 solarlamp at wholesale prices of 75% off retail. On some level she was hated because she was a woman. Between men who hated themselves for responding to Thatchers stern, dominatrix-like scolding (watch You turn if you want to; the ladys not for turning and tell me you dont get chills) and women who wondered why our breakthrough female politician had to be a woman like her (though we surely knew that only an Iron Lady could have smashed the mold of British politics), the fact that Thatcher was female complicated things. Even her name was a hostage to ideology: Those on the left always used a condescending diminutive Maggie Thatcher while her devotees on the right used the honorific Mrs. Thatcher.

But in the typical British way, I have always believed that it was her slippery position in Britains rigid class system that ramped up the levels of loathing. She grew up the daughter of a Midlands grocer in what the Guardians Michael White called the respectable working class. Although she famously learned to speak in a posh accent as she climbed the political ladder, she grew up in a house without an indoor bathroom. Although throwing in her lot with the Conservative Party made her a traitor to her own class, the Tories apparently celebrated their colleagues upward mobility they did, after all, make her their leader, even if she was never quite one of them.

By some estimates, tens of thousands of Christians have left post-revolution Egypt. Like the former textile maker, they have left due to concerns over rising Muslim conservatism and a general instability they say is emboldening attacks against them.

Perhaps the most dramatic example of sectarian tension yet occurred Sunday in central Cairo, where a crowd attacked Christian mourners after they emerged from a funeral in Egypt's main Coptic Christian cathedral. The funeral was for four men killed in a Cairo gunfight Friday, in which a Muslim man also was killed. Some of the mourners, joined by sympathetic Muslims, filed out of St. Mark's Cathedral shouting exhortations against Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi and his largely Islamic government.

The crowd responded to the demonstrators with rocks and gasoline bombs. Police eventually moved in, but numerous and independent news agencies reported police appeared to take the side of crowd, firing tear-gas canisters into the St. Mark's courtyard and taking no action to stop the attacks on the Christians and their church.

"It is now clear that the state needs to take that responsibility far more seriously," responded Bishop Angaelos, general bishop of the Coptic Orthodox Church in the United Kingdom, in a statement released after Sunday's violence. Since the 2011 popular uprising that deposed former President Hosni Mubarak, Angaelos said, "we have seen escalating and increasing attacks on Christians, Christian communities, churches and now the Patriarchate during this past period of expected improvement, and so questions must be asked. What are the authorities waiting for? More bloodshed, violence, hostility, alienation, marginalisation, division, or just more anarchy?"

She declined to say how many requests her embassy had received recently, or how they could be religiously broken down, but she insisted it was "too easy" to assume Christians were leaving due to religious persecution, suggesting they, as their Muslim compatriots, were seeking "better security and economic opportunities" in other countries, including hers.

There are no official figures for how many Christians have left Egypt since the revolution, though estimates range as high as in the tens of thousands.

"When there is no clarity, rumors abound," said Ibrahim Isaac Sedrak,About buymosaic in China userd for paying transportation fares and for shopping. Patriarch of Egypt's estimated 250,000 Coptic Catholics. "There are those saying hundreds of thousands, others saying thousands, but there are people leaving, this we know - and not only Christians, Muslims are leaving as well."

He and other Christian leaders, including Pope Tawadros, have publicly called on their communities "not to be afraid," and to "pray for stability and peace in the homeland." But some have also admitted that convincing their communities to stay is becoming harder to do.

"I don't have what is needed to convince them not to travel abroad," Sedrak said. "All I can do is to tell them we are here in our country, (and) we have a message. Yes, we have difficulties here, but there are difficulties outside too."

沒有留言:

張貼留言