You Couldn't Make It Up by Nigel Oakley

‘You couldn’t make it up.’

That’s the trouble, the worry, and my concern. Try as I might, avoiding the news these days is well-nigh impossible. However, I can’t help thinking if I, or any other author for that matter, wrote a story about a man who preyed on weak and vulnerable girls, but who had so many rich and powerful (and male) friends who not only protected him but, when he finally got into trouble, were neither prosecuted nor investigated themselves. And if I also wrote that this man, on his release from prison, had female friends who would find girls for him – or ask him to visit when their own daughters were home – the manuscript would have been rejected out of hand as beyond the realms of credibility.

And yet it looks like this has happened ‘in real life.’ Lower down the social scale, amongst those of us with less access to money and position, we wonder why women don’t feel safe. I have had a phone conversation with my son terminated – because he needed to make sure the line was open so his girlfriend could call him if, or when, she felt unsafe walking home after work: ‘the police won’t do anything.’

This is today’s ‘normal.’ It looks to me as if we have begun to accept a society where the rich and powerful can regard obeying the law as optional: if a law is inconvenient, don’t bother about it. Given the mess that is our court system, it appears this attitude has percolated down to produce a society where the strong can, with impunity, prey on the weak.

‘’Twas ever thus,’ I was told with a shrug by an older and supposedly wiser Christian; and, as a writer of historical fiction, I have to agree there was no ‘golden age.’ But there have always in the past been those who have said this is wrong. They have often been ignored, side-lined, even prosecuted, but they’ve not shut up. My question for us today, as more-than-writers – and it is a question for myself also – is how are we to write, how are we to live, to show that it is those who spoke up against this system who will, ultimately, be on the side of the angels? Because, as another older Christian once quoted: ‘The moral arc of the universe is long, but it always tends towards justice.’

 

Nigel Oakley

Nigel was originally a Shropshire lad, being born and raised in Shrewsbury. His teaching career took him from the south-west of England to Teesside via Botswana, Africa. He has also served as World Development Officer for the Diocese of Durham for five years. Now settled back in the West Midlands, he spends his time writing novels, short stories, and other pieces – as well as sorting his house out!

His website is www.nigeloakleywrites.com