We need to take breaks from our concerns to celebrate things: sport, Christmas, birthdays, weddings, being alive.
Whatever their personal and even tragic failings, the Kennedy message (the message that resonated so powerfully with the young back in the 1960s) was that we could step beyond our narrow personal concerns to achieve great things, that we could do better, be better, if only we had the strength and courage to work harder and dream bigger.
The down-side of that position is, however, a whole set of difficult concerns to do with things, such as nature or persons, that hardly qualify as art even though they invite aesthetic experiences.
We came across as having the outrage of sceptics of capitalism, not the concern to sort things out of critical friends of capitalism.
When we look at Eliot's writings on culture, we see a fine critical intelligence allied to a fear of possible consequences that is deeply terrifying in the way that in it elitist arrogance masquerades as humility and passionate concern to keep things as they are as a broadly accepting humanism.
When I mentioned my concerns to friends, they'd say things like, "I know this guy John, he's 107, and he's still skiing double black diamond moguls".
Senior civil servants, including the permanent secretary, were likewise kept apart and there was therefore "no one to escalate concerns to" when it became clear things were going wrong.
I think they had a lot of opinions about things, but it just wasn't their main concern to express those things.
Although I was concerned to make sure things would go well, I was, however, not too surprised, since I really didn't have much to do with it.
