The age of outrage has arrived

It’s an outrage! The dictionary definition of ‘outrage’ in this sense is ‘something that is grossly offensive to decency, morality or good taste’, or resentful anger caused by this. The frequency of outrages these days seems to have gone up by multiples. But is that really the case?

It often feels these days that there is simply too much mad stuff going on, day in day out. Let’s have a look at the last few weeks. As usual, something crazy happened every couple of hours. Jews were assaulted by a racist mob in Leicester Square, and the police took half an hour to show up, after ten 999 calls. This is in central London, where you’d think a conspicuous police presence would be handy. What else? A man called Darren Collins related via X the nightmarish story of how he was unable to locate his 86-year-old dementia-suffering mother after she had a fall and was admitted to hospital.