Notre Dame: Priorities?

I know I’m going to receive a huge amount of backlash for this one but I really don’t care. Having lived a life of many and varied challenges, if I’ve learnt one thing, it’s that some things in life are so much more important than others.

If you’ve seen ‘Kingdom of Us’ you will already know that ‘The Mad Shanks Residence’ isn’t exactly a nominee for the Beautiful Home Award, lack of money and having other priorities mean that the house still functions in all the ways that we need it to, but it’s far from pristine.

It really doesn’t matter, as long as water still comes out of the tap, the oven heats up and the electricity works, the rest is irrelevant. Someone new to the house spills something on the floor and looks as though they’ll die with embarrassment as I surely must be mad about it? Errr…no, they are hastily reassured, there are so many more things in this world that are so much more important (their feelings being the immediate priority) that the day I start stressing about a little bit of spilt milk will be the day I know I have to do an immediate and intensive ‘attitude check’!

Over the last 11 years since Paul’s suicide I have made my children my number one priority, nothing else comes anywhere close to being as important as their mental and physical wellbeing. They’ve experienced enough trauma in their short lives, they don’t need me screaming about the ‘small stuff’, and in comparison, it’s all ‘small stuff’.

Which brings me on to Notre Dame, one of the worlds most iconic buildings, much loved and visited by the faithful, and the not faithful, just for the sake of being able to say they’ve been. The fact that the building has been ravaged by fire is, absolutely, a tragedy, but, it’s an inanimate object, a building, it can be re-built.

It’s estimated that nearly £1b has been donated so far, that’s a huge amount of money, but, to put it into perspective, HS2 is projected to end up costing £60b (minimum) but the truth is that no-one actually knows for sure.

In the meantime, we are all happily and knowingly killing off our planet, our home, the only one we have by the way. The billions being spent on projects like HS2 and re-building Notre Dame could go an awful long way to solving some of the other pressing problems in our world. Apparently, £1b would be enough to clear the ‘The Great Pacific Garbage Patch‘ or at least go a long way towards it. I’m vegetarian, but don’t those who eat fish care about the amount of plastic particles they are now ingesting along with their Omega 3, or how the plastic is affecting marine life in such a detrimental way that we’re actually killing off our oceans? There won’t be many fish to eat if we carry on as we are!

So, am I saying that Notre Dame shouldn’t be re-built? Absolutely not, it should be restored to its former glory, it’s of huge historical importance but one of the wealthiest organisations in the world is the Catholic Church, they could afford to restore it without donations!

HS2 should be scrapped and the money spent on the desperately failing railways in the North and South, the ones that thousands of people use every day to try to get to work, the people that work 8 hours a day and spend a further 4/5 hours having to arrive at the train station in the early hours in order to have a fighting chance of even getting on a train, only to then having the privilege of playing ‘sardines’ with complete strangers for the entire journey.

Why, as a species, do we have such skewed priorities? I know different people have different priorities and thank goodness we do, we need people to care about various things so that everything is cared about, but, sometimes, something SO big comes along that all else pales into insignificance. We are in that time and place now, we are killing our planet, our children will suffer as a result, and we’re doing it knowingly. The extent of our ignorance is bewildering, the things we set as priorities are anything but and the billions we invest into things of lesser importance is staggering.

Re-build Notre Dame, of course, but use the money the Catholic Church already has and let the money donated go towards something that will actually save lives

I feel these are sad times..