WHAT PRICE A BARGAIN?

I like to think that I have an eye for a bargain, and sometimes a genuine one can be found. It is usually something that no one else wants and the owner is willing to part with it for a nominal sum. However, when it comes to the competition between major retailers, we must remember that they are in business ultimately to make lots of money and that there really is no such thing as a real bargain. They want to attract customers who feel that they are getting the best value for their money even if that has meant hammering down their suppliers to the lowest possible rate.

A professor of physics explained that the beat of a butterfly's wings in China has an effect on the winds and climate on the other side of the world. If this is so, then in a similar way, all of our actions are bound to have an effect upon others. In relation to trade, this often means that the poorest and the most vulnerable of the world are even more deprived as a result of our insistence upon a 'bargain'. In other words, poverty in one part of the world, comes as a result of sheer greed in another.

So much time, money and energy is wasted on things that are of no real and lasting value. Look at all those 'essential items' to modern living that we find advertised on the shopping channels on the television and in the catalogues that come with our weekend newspapers - how has mankind managed to exist for thousands of years without them? Why is it that some sports personalities (who, after all, are only providing the public with entertainment!) earn more in a week than a professional, like a nurse, earns in a decade? - or that chairmen of companies who have failed are rewarded for their mistakes with a pay-off equivalent to a massive win on the National Lottery?

This is not just something that happens elsewhere - it is also right here on our doorstep. I find it hard to believe that in this beautiful part of the country where we are privileged to live, there are people who own second, or even third homes, whose market prices look like mobile-telephone numbers when they are written down. For much of the year, so I am told, these places lie unoccupied, while many local young people, seeking to set up their first home are unable to find even a modest dwelling that they can afford. And why, with part of our locality having the fourth most expensive properties, per square metre, in the world, do we find that there are so many living on the streets, in our local parks, and dossing down under the piers?

All of this is not someone else's problem - we all bear responsibility, to a varying degree, for the problems of our communities and of the world at large, where through greed and ambition some of our fellow human beings are trampled under foot - those who we then ignore and fail to lift a finger to help. But it will not always be so - there will come a time of reckoning for all of us, because God does not 'do bargains'! As a wise man once wrote: Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God and keep his commandments; for this is the whole duly of man. For God shall bring every work into judgement, and every secret thing, whether it be good or whether it be evil.

Martin Fredriksen

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