I refuse

 I’m sorry. I refuse. I won’t do it. 

“Ugh, people!” said my son after a day working in a Supermarket. Normally, I would agree with him. People. Yuk. But yesterday I wasn’t so sure.

He was complaining about how people are behaving over the fuel issue. The queues were so long for the petrol station at 5.30am, he (who is always early) was late for work. The store managers had to stop people putting food on shelves and getting people’s home deliveries ready to go out and manage the queue. Fights were beginning to break out and the whole town had become gridlocked. 

“It’s a mess,” I agreed, which has been the phrase I’ve said more than any other in the last few years.

He tried to explain the party line that we are gullibly buying. 

“There’s no need for it. If people weren’t panic buying there wouldn’t be a problem.”

It is true that panic buying interferes with the very tight stock control systems and we should have learnt but you can’t just blame all people, except yourself.

Where do you draw the line? The NHS worker who got an email telling them to make sure they have enough petrol in the car to get to work for the next week? The ambulance who drove to four garages before putting £200 worth of fuel in? The HGV lorry that took £600 worth of diesel? The old man filling one can for his lawnmower because the council have threatened to evict him from the allotment if he doesn’t cut his verges? The lady who is off to lunch with friends and notices that the fuel tank is close to the red and knows that although it will probably get her home the fact that she has driven her past 4 empty stations makes her imagine running out on a dark country lane  on the way home and getting raped and murdered by the strange men that are supposed to lurk in those places? The business man who has a meeting the next day in Leeds and thinks he better fill up now while he can? 

No, no, you say, not those people. It’s the others. It’s always the others but the others are us.

Maybe you mean the person that is buying an extra can because they are scared that if the situation gets worse then they won’t get to work and they’ll lose the job that has only just re-started? Or the  lady who is filling up the car she never uses in case her husband, who has terminal cancer needs to go to hospital and they can’t get an ambulance? 

I mean, apart from me, who would rather walk everywhere, who doesn’t need fuel?

They might not need it now but they can see with their own eyes that when they need petrol the pumps could be empty.

OK, you say, then it’s the newspapers’ fault because if they hadn’t  written the stories then people wouldn’t have panicked. That doesn’t work because they wrote about diesel shortages and it’s really bad form to shoot the messenger.

Then it’s teacher’s fault because people can’t read properly. That’s probably true, everything can be blamed on teachers.

The problem with complex issues are that there is no one person, or thing to blame. There are many contributing factors.

You might tell me that it’s the government’s lack of forward planning, Brexit, a backlog in medical for HGV drivers, Covid, antivax lorry drivers, new (since 1970) driving tests, lack of decent pay, relying on a just in time delivery system or the French (it’s usually the French). It’s probably all of-those and more.

I think about my grandmother, her larder full of sugar and insistence that she was ‘never going to be caught out again’. People who panicked and stocked up before World War II were praised for their foresight. They thrived while others died. Can we really blame people who have a strong survival instinct?

So, I refuse. There are enough problems without constantly trying the blame ‘the others’.