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October – November 2025 : Making a difference READ ONLINE

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It is what it is

October 01 2025

In a world that all too often overwhelms and exhausts, people can make a difference. By André Rostant 

Just when you think you are cured of being human. Precisely when your scepticism is honed, your eyebrow raise perfected and you are pouring smug thought-terminating clichés effortlessly down on whatever outrages life throws at you – that’s when it happens. Nobody, least of all you, can fathom why you dropped the jar and are standing in the supermarket, screaming incoherently, the sobbing epicentre of a fountain of vinegar and broken glass, pickled onions bouncing in all directions. Nobody, least of all you, can guess why the rebounding onions strike you as funny, ironic, make you burst into laughter before the screams resurge, claw their way up again from the depth of your confusion. At least you create a welcome diversion for the young woman shoplifting nappies and baby formula from aisle four.

Confronted with this spectacle, supermarket staff make a snap decision. If you are not white, if you are unshaven and scruffy, if you are known to beg or to have a drug or alcohol issue, they will likely call the police. Let us hope you are a respectable-looking middle-aged white man and that, at worst, an ambulance is called, you are mollified and referred to your GP. As you might have said before you went shopping, "it is what it is."

What is the it that it is? Is it what allows us to doomscroll over starving children, suburban infernos, wars? Does it empower you to stroll past people begging and shrug off chuggers, forcefield of denial intact? Is it part of an emotional immune system, a variety of the it of piles of unopened bills?

Does it have shades of the it of smokers who insist on only drinking filtered water, or of believing an abusive partner will undergo a Damascene conversion?

All the above. It is that gift we have of filtering out unpalatable realities even as they stare us in the face. We cleave to the security blanket that is our expectation of normality. Here in Britain, as in many other countries, prevailing social hierarchy, history, culture and custom have epitomised that normality, stability, security, as a world presided over and organised by adult men – typically white men. We learned in school that the abolition of slavery was brought about by Lincoln and Wilberforce, Superman swishes to our rescue, Indiana Jones saves the day. We have it internalised: the 2023 United Nations Development Programme’s Gender Social Norms Index (covering 85% of the global population), found that nine out of 10 men and women hold biases against women who, despite making up over half the world’s population, are invariably described as a minority.

Before you spit out your cornflakes, picture right now, in your head, a Member of Parliament, a butcher or doctor, a police officer, a managing director. Think of five dominant historical figures. Be honest. If any doubt remains, google images of Christ. How many of the people you pictured are men?

There is resistance. Suffragettes, for example, bombed and burned their way to the ballot box. One early breakthrough coming in 1918 when Constance Markievicz, while languishing in Holloway prison, became the first woman elected to the UK Parliament, as MP for Dublin St Patrick’s.

In early July, 200 female MPs, Markievicz’s heirs, sported suffragette sashes in Westminster Hall to commemorate another milestone, the 1928 Equal Franchise Act, before proceeding upstairs to the House of Commons and voting to proscribe as terrorists the protest group Palestine Action. Days later those same MPs marked Mandela Day, in celebration of that great man’s contribution to the struggle for democracy. The UK welcomes the formation of the new Syrian government; we have always been at war with Eastasia.

The epiphanic 1926 Balfour Declaration announced constitutional equality between the UK and its dominions, auguring a performative political alchemy that would mask the transubstantiation of empire into Commonwealth. Suddenly, universal brotherhood and equality had been the objective all along. Overnight, two years into the American Civil War, emancipation of enslaved people was revealed to be the true casus belli.

This teaches that what you and I do can make a difference. The 83-year-old Reverend Sue Parfitt might be a latter-day Rosa Parks, Palestine Action might be deproscribed, as the Indian National Congress Party was in 1934, and the African National Congress in 1990. It also cautions against co-opting into minor adjustments of the status quo. How many individuals and movements, having gained leverage or achieved power, find themselves swept along on a tide of realpolitik?

In the absence of a solution, it’s back to the shop for more pickled onions, and turning a blind eye to the young woman in aisle four.

Well, it is what it is.

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October – November 2025 : Making a difference

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