Tag: child poverty

Daily Recommendations Of Happy & Healthy

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

To be a happy and healthy human being in this world we seem to need to combine a rather large variety of things. This combination too varies from person to person and while there are probably a few fundamentals like food, shelter and company, to be both happy and healthy may require a little more than the basic versions of these things. Perhaps being able to attach a noun modifier like good would help and add a little further clarity. We could attempt to include the idea of various possessions like a mobile phone, car or warm jacket, but it’s not worth going down that avenue as it’s validity would be questionable at best. So we stick to the three fundamentals above. There are more I imagine but right now these are the first that come to mind. Perhaps you could throw liberty in there too but unless it’s severely restricted it would probably be something we could adapt to without much fuss.

Shelter seems like an obvious one but there is a difference between a fifteenth floor inner city apartment and a countryside estate. There will be the same extreme ends of the spectrum for company too from friends and lovers to flatmates we have to endure. It is the issue of food that I want to focus on though. I definitely see happiness in food, I associate it with love and one of my favourite things is sitting around a table eating and drinking with friends and family. The happy then is covered but the healthy is were I’m a little confused. There are the obvious things like making sure you eat vegetables and wholegrains, as much organic as possible and to stay away from processed anything when you can. I have a varied level of success on all three of those but I still don’t always feel healthy. I suspect part of that is down to how healthy my gut microbiome is and I’m working on that to the point where I think I can sense and feel improvement specifically because of it. The other is whether I get my recommended daily allowance (RDA) of the required vitamins and minerals. I was looking into how to get enough magnesium yesterday and discovered that perhaps it’s not as easy to achieve this mythical RDA as previously thought. Unlike child poverty figures, it’s not possible to simply change the definition to achieve the desired outcome. Our bodies need what they need and this RDA seems to already be the minimum.

One avocado then provides 15%, a cup of lentils 30%, a two hundred gram fillet of salmon contains 15%, two bananas 20% and half a cup of cooked spinach the final 20%. That’s not impossible to imagine eating in a day but these are also some of the more magnesium heavy foods so the rest of the weeks diet would need to be of a similarly high standard. It is for this reason we must attach good to food. If you would struggle to fund such a diet, which in itself is reasonably common, then there’s a good chance you’re going to struggle to stay healthy and considering that a lack of magnesium can affect our energy and mental health, probably happy too. It seems life is complex. A good life at least. But that’s nothing a new pair of trainers can’t fix.

Marcus The Man

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

Footballers have a reasonably well known reputation for being a bit thick. This is probably a little unfair and is as much down to being constantly under a media fuelled microscope. At any opportunity they’re straight on the front page; from Gazza being a drunkard, Rooney sleeping with prostitutes who happen to be grandmas, Raheem Sterling getting a misunderstood tattoo, Cantona fighting xenophobic racists and David Beckham’s new haircut. There are an infinite number of examples but these are the ones which spring to mind immediately and which also probably show my age. If you take any spectrum of society and put it in the spotlight for long enough you’ll get exciting stories you can smuggly judge them over while feeling morally superior. It just so appears though that one of them has gone and reversed the trend.

Marcus Rashford, the Manchester United and England striker, has used his fame to pressure the government into fulfilling their end of the social contract and feeding the 1.3 million children on free school meal vouchers. Ordinarily they would stop as term time ended but with the unprecedented events relating to the coronavirus this year there have been calls for the scheme to extend throughout the six weeks of summer holiday too, as will be happening in Scotland and Wales. The government initially rejected his call, with some MPs putting their rather callous foot in it, but with widespread coverage of his request over the last twenty four hours they’ve been forced to back down and make a u-turn. There’s nothing politicians like less than admitting they were wrong and being forced to change their mind.

They claimed they had already put aside £63 million to help poor families and that this would be sufficient. Providing free school meals over the summer will cost another £120 million, at £15 per week per child, which dwarfs the previously allotted money. Now either they’ve drastically underestimated the number of children living in poverty or the £63 million was insufficient and nothing more than a token gesture for appearances sake. Why they were willing to take on a hero in the eyes of many on this is anyone’s guess, but they did and they lost. This isn’t the first time a footballer has used his position to try and achieve something positive but it is the first time I can think of that the end result has been so positive and will help so many people. I can imagine there’ll be a few more kids wanting to play as Rashford in the park from now on.

Karma

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

Karma is a concept we’re all vaguely familiar with. I could be mistaken but it would probably not be a leap to imagine the general consensus being that if you do something good something good will happen to you and in turn doing bad will result is something bad happening back to you. That is a rather crude explanation but I imagine it more or less stands up. The next question would be whether the resulting return is the equivalent to the action, for example if you give a homeless man a sandwich will you get either a sandwich given to you later or the moral value of the sandwich in the form of something else? In truth I can’t answer that because I don’t know. It surely wouldn’t be too much of a push though to find holes in this idea of direct equivalence. In that case it must be more of a general thing, do some good and some good will happen to you.

There is one thing that I have always struggled with though and it is the idea that we can do good with the intention of receiving good in return. In George Orwell’s Burmese Days, U Po Kyin the corrupt magistrate and resident bad guy of the story, admits towards the end that before he dies he plans on building a series of Pagodas in honour of The Buddha and that with this act he will earn enough good karma points to receive a positive rebirth in the next life. This raises two issues, firstly that the Buddhist idea of karma revolves around the concept of rebirth unlike ours which is just that good shit will happen to you and secondly the rather perverse notion that you can buy good karma. I once asked some people at a pagoda when I was in Burma about being able to buy good karma and for them it seemed perfectly reasonable. The point here then returns to this idea of what the intentions behind the act are. For example if you buy one hundred meals for homeless children purely for the sake of the children this is an uncorrupted act. If you do the same but with an awareness that you’ll receive the equivalent in return this is not a positive act despite the positive outcome, the selfish intentions surely nullify any karmic points that you hoped to accrue. Does this mean that with the knowledge of and belief in the existence of karma your actions will forever be slightly tainted despite you best efforts? The knowledge and creation of karma renders a karmically pure act impossible? Fuck knows but surely just having loads of cash shouldn’t make it easier to avoid coming back as a frog.

If we insist on giving the receipt of positivity or negativity a name then so be it, but surely by merely being a good person and doing good things we find ourselves on a general level surrounded by good people and good actions. There will be extreme instances which go against the norm but it’s not hard to imagine. In a way it is the classic like attracts like argument and is easily just another way of describing a view of karma. Naturally the Buddhists would be able to look at this and say I’m not describing karma at all and clearly misunderstand it, in that case so be it. This then can be more about the idea that good people tend to be surrounded by other good people and bad with bad. It is probably worth mentioning that I also have issues with the concept of good and bad, and cringe at my own use of it. Maybe that could be for tomorrows piece though. In the meantime I’m going to go buy a sandwich and see who I can find, just in case.