Still work to do, alas

The 1970's was a great time.  Don't let anyone tell you differently.  Modern media paints a picture of the 1970's being nothing but a mixture of power cuts, unburied dead and brown wallpaper.  Sure, we had all that but we also had much, much more.  For one, we had the arrival of colour television!  Forget your wall-to-wall online streaming services, NOTHING comes close to the excitement of the first time seeing all the bridge officers in Star Trek in their glorious primary colours!  And there were more musical genres than you can shake a rhythm stick at - Glam, Pop, Heavy, Punk and Prog Rock, Disco, New Wave, Funk and the Wombles.  We had affordable housing and even more affordable beer.  We had the greatest run of brilliant movies ever - The Godfather 1 & 2, The Exorcist, Jaws, Star Wars (and NOT A New Hope....), Holiday on the Buses and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  Winning the Football League was pretty much a guarantee of winning the European Cup.  We had it all.

Unfortunately we also had rampant, unapologetic racism in society in general and in football in particular.  Racism and homophobia were, at times, so casual and common place that it would have made even Tommy Robinson blush.

As much as a progressive, civilised society would like to believe that in the intervening years abuse of people based solely on skin colour or sexual preference had receded such that only those on the very outer fringes of our species still harboured (quietly) such views, all too often we are reminded this is not the case.

A Premier League game on Friday was halted for 5 minutes when a Liverpool fan couldn't dredge his imagination deep enough when insulting Bournemouth striker Semenyo to aim beyond the colour of his skin.  We were one game into the season and this was the main news story coming from Anfield.  One guy in a crowd if 50,000 is statistically zero, but it is so dispiriting that such incidents still occur.

Unfortunately it would appear we never truly conquered intolerance and that the worst of it merely slumbered for a few decades until the time was right for it to rise again.  For most of the past 30-odd years your common-or-garden hard-right misanthrope at least had the decency to keep their repulsive views to themselves.  Well, decency might be too strong.  More likely they realised their views were poison and the vast majority of the population would rightly vilify them if they spoke up.

Pride-designed laces and armbands, and taking the knee before kick-off have really been shown-up as the empty gestures they are when the country's most popular and populist politician spouts nothing but unchallenged racist lies, and the supposed "Leader of the Free World" is a tiny moustache, and one testicle away from being a full-blown fascist.  With people like this dominating the public discourse it's hardly surprising their binary views are starting to become common currency again with certain, vocal elements.

This all came to mind yesterday when listening to the tannoy announcements that racist and other intolerant language would lead to lifetime bans.  Leaving aside how enforceable such a ban would be as regimes and club ownership changes over the years, I pondered if ANY threats would deter someone who lives on a diet of social-media conspiracy and echo-chamber, dog-whistle hard-right rhetoric from venting their bile when the mood took them?  Even if they can't be educated about their views, we can only hope they can try to keep their "thoughts" to themselves for the 90 minutes they spend with the rest of us.

This is NOT normal.
Satan usually has higher standards.