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| The ever-sensible Michael Atherton puts one away |
This post is to channel a thought from the ever sensible Michael Atherton. This is from his column in The Times, which unfortunately is behind a paywall. So here is the punchline:
"The increasing tendency for people to define themselves by identity (ethnicity, race, gender etc) was undermining empathy among Britons... the challenge is to ensure we don’t end up in a siloed world where everybody is hypersensitive about their own individual interests.
The key issue is how do we move beyond the ‘I’ to the ‘we’, how do we think of ourselves as citizens in a country or in the world .”
The context for Atherton's comment is the very English issue of social class in cricket. Cricket has long been unfairly, sometimes absurdly, portrayed as an upper-class game, which it never was.
But at a moment when the biggest controversy in English cricket is the racism Azeem Rafiq says is endemic in Yorkshire, when the two hundred year old tradition of the Eton vs. Harrow game at Lord's has been cancelled, Michael Atherton has touched on a truth which is much bigger than cricket or even England. We become a better game/ country/ world by focusing on the humanity that unites us, rather than the many million identities that divide us.
