What possesses someone to destroy an allotment used by a disabled woman who has supplied food to over 1600 people during the cost of living crisis? That’s what happened to Carly Burd. You can read the story here in order to save me cutting and pasting the contents. There’s some horrible people out there, but before I return to my usual theme on how there are so many more good people out there than bad – and that’s a fact – let’s stay, temporarily, with the wrong ‘uns.
As someone who dabbled in pointless vandalism as a child, I do not want to be the sinner who cast the first stone, but these days it makes me so angry. There are millions of people in our country who have nothing, people who can’t afford to eat and can’t afford to heat. Ms Burd does something about it and look what happens. Yet a brief trip onto social media and it turns out she is getting as much abuse as the scumbags who tore up her produce and salted the ground.
According to the media, Ms Burd is on disability benefits because she has multiple sclerosis and lupus. She has transformed her garden into an allotment to help people. But guess what? She is getting grief from the usual anonymous internet hard men (and women, for all I know) who question her disabilities if she is able to work unpaid in her garden. I cannot know the details of what benefits she gets and why and frankly I am not interested but given the stringent rules in place by the DWP I rather doubt she is getting something she shouldn’t be. I would have thought what she does in therapeutic both mentally and physically. But some folk always prefer to frame another narrative, that she is a workshy scrounger who should get a proper job.
After the destruction of her allotment, she set up a Go Fund Me page with a target of £4000. As I write, the sum raised is rapidly approaching £160,000 which rather confirms my point about there being more good people than bad. But even now, some are suggesting she should now lose her benefits because she has so much money, despite the fact that every penny she raises is used to benefit others.
I really hope one or more of the gutter press red tops doesn’t go after her, but I’m afraid that my cynicism makes me wonder if certain ‘journalists’ – I use the word advisedly – are already in the business of turning her life upside down. People, they believe, just love bad news, which must be why they buy their newspapers.
Hopefully, the good people of Harlow in Essex will provide a protective ring around Ms Burd and help her rebuild her wonderful project and perhaps help her create something even bigger and better thanks to the kindness of The Great British Public.
Finally, wouldn’t it be great if the miscreants who trashed the allotment had the courage to visit Ms Burd, to apologise and offer to repair the damage they had caused? That, I realise, would require courage and I doubt that following their pathetic show of cowardliness they have even an ounce of it. She is a do-gooder and don’t sections of the media just hate people who do good?
