WE HAVE among us people who very quickly forget where they came from.

I’m sorry to say there is a growing number of people who simply think they were transported to this country magically.

And now they are here they can speak out against others who might want to come to this country.

It has been another harrowing month with quite some unsavoury headlines.

And this week the world did indeed have to take a long hard look at itself.

Rather than get into the rights and wrongs of particular opinions one cannot ignore the fact that we are not special.

Just because we live here does not make us extra special human beings. The fact is we are lucky.

I say this about everyone who just happened to live in a ‘developed’ country What I find most disconcerting sometimes is how I can be sat with second and third generation immigrants who tend to think they are indeed ‘special’.

They will moan about immigrants and people coming to this country without realising how stupid the whole argument sounds.

They are ignorant of the fact that they themselves are descendants of immigrants.

Yes, one is welcome to hold such views and it does not necessarily make you some sort of rampant racist but I find it strange that people are quick to point out the inadequacies of other people’s plight without realising the irony of it all.

I had one fellow moaning about ‘Polish shops’.

Yet, in the 70s we opened up the odd grocer’s too.

Anyway, by any standards the new Polish shops on Redlam and King Street in my town have actually made the stretch a better place.

‘Regeneration through immigration’ I call it.

What makes the immigrants who came here in the 1960s different from those coming here now?

What makes them so special?

‘They were invited here whilst the others were not’, I heard someone say.

Go back and try telling that to your granddad and see what response you get.

The fact is one generation will be replaced by another and one set will move from one part of the world to the next. It happened a hundred years ago and it will happen in the future.

It is how we react to these changes as human beings that makes us what we are.