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Uneasy Pleistocene Leftover
Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: South of the North Pole, north of the South Pole...
Posts: 303
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In maternity wards everywhere forthwith (sign with audio in uhmmm, English, Urdu, Welsh, Hindi etc. ):
Quote:
The crying or wailing, or any expressions thereof, of any parties here present, contracts the person/s to abide to the following agreement:
1) You have entered a danger zone. Called life. The professionals here at maternity will endeavour to do their best for mother and child/ren. Any liability is limited to the boundaries of this institution, determined by the exit sign.
2) Welcome! We have the greatest confidence in your future. So much so in fact, that you have already been awarded an important part of the nation's national endebtedness. At the present time, we anticipate that you have a life expectancy of 70 to 85 years, depending on your sex.
3) Alas, all the Queen's best specialists haven't yet determined the cause of society's ills or been able to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. We're still not sure if the reasons are what goes on before, or after birth or a mixture of the 2. Whatever makes someone a future law-abiding, tax-paying, non-scrounging citizen, murderer, tax-evader, paedophile, wife-batterer, politician or single-parent family is still beyond our determination. But be reassured, we no longer burn witches at the stake...
4) If you get through the "sleeping cot" and "shaken baby" syndromes, measeles, smallpox etc., you will be educated to the age of 16 to 30 or thereabouts. By which time you'll have been sufficiently well-exposed to, but hopefully not overly-abused by siblings, family, drugs, sex, alcohol, tobacco, politicians, dogooders, religious nuts etc. (NB. we cannot guarantee that all these abuses will be available to all abusees all of the time, we'll do our best...).
5) Nevertheless, from your 1st day of work, you'll be expected to contribute towards the upkeep of your fellow citizens. Anywhere between 1.5 and 2.5 of them by all account. These might well include your parents, grand-parents, uncles, aunties and cousins. But to be frank, they'd probably have to include a few disadvantaged people, who basically never contributed much to general society. These would include any number of politicians who retired on fat pensions after a very short period of service, civil servants who always had it better than their privately-employed counterparts and of course your general run-of-the-mill thieves, criminals, fraudsters and scroungers.
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PS. Any party can signal their disagreement by crawling back into wherever or whatever they came from...    
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