The Plan
Well, the planned four weeks in Italy just chilling out just wasn’t possible in the end, so we’ve now made alternative plans that looks something like this:
Brighton — Ireland — Preston (nr Liverpool) — Green Man Festival (Wales)– Buddhist Retreat
It is fully laid out in our online intinerary.
Currently hanging out with friends in Brighton. We’ve just been out for a ramble on the South Downs followed by a big late Sunday lunch.
I asked Bea to give me some words to put here, and she’s offered one of her surreal knock-knock jokes for y’all:
Knock knock
(”who’s there”, you say)
Cactus
(”Cactus who?”, you say)
Cactus got stuck in a monkey bush and had to lie down on the icecream.
What more can I say?
Knock, Knock…..it’s me…..thought you needed some food for thought from home…..
Now, that great publication the West Australian does not often offer much hope for humankind, but guess what, last week I found this amazing letter to the editor that does offer hope. I reckon you have to saviour these moments, so here it is (a bit long but worth the read:
Congratulations to your correspondents R. Roberts and Michael Giles (Letters 25/7) for highlighting the ridiculous imbalance in facing the real world issues. The Western world and your newspaper and the media in general should focus on that imbalance.
We were all quite properly horrified at the London bombings the deaths of 58 innocent people and the injury to more than 700. Yet while our leaders are now discussing ID cards and attending church services to celebrate the goodness and works of Christ, managing to fit in visits to the Ashes and planning to combat the growing mayhem in Iraq, 2.6 million people, mainly women and children, are about to die of starvation in Niger, Central Africa.
Say it slowly, readers of The West Australian – 2.6 million. There are also more than a million displaced people in the Darfur region of Sudan, there is chaos and mayhem developing in Zimbabwe, with hundreds of thousands of innocent people homeless and facing starvation. In years tribal warfare in the Congo, more than three million people have died. The British foreign Minister has recently returned from apologising to the people of Bosnia for our inaction over the large-scale ethnic cleansing in that country several years ago. We could go back further – Rwanda, the ethnic cleansing of Burma, the killing fields of Cambodia and so on and so on. And let us not dwell for a moment on the 20 million-plus destined to die in AIDS.
Yet still the “civilised” and “Christian” world does nothing. Spending billions on phoney “wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq is OK. Spending billions on new “permanent” air force bases in and around the Middle East is OK. Spending billions on internal and external measures to fight the other phoney war, the “war on terrorism”, is OK. But galvanising the world and providing leadership to prevent this ongoing, horrendous and unnecessary loss of life (to prevent future terrorism) is something the leaders of the Western world will do only when they have time.
The final irony is that we then have the temerity to accuse the suicide bombers of “inhuman, uncivilised and undemocratic” behaviour (and, yes it is), but who is the grater terrorist? Could it be the wise men who know what is happening and do nothing? Could it be you and me who do nothing?
Sydney R. Sheath, Como
Good isn’t it?
Let’s get critical mass going. If our leaders in the rich western countries will not provide leadership that will address poverty and starvation we will have to do it ourselves. It is a shame beyond comprehension that we in the rich world still allow poverty and starvation. Get active!!!!! Check out makepovertyhistory.org
Knock, knock…..
Johan
Johan,
With you all the way here. You know, it feels like the folk here in the UK really do get this stuff at a deeper level than you’d expect in Australia, which is why seeing that letter is so refreshing.
I’ve just added the makepovertyhistory.org banners here. Better late than never, I guess.
Keep up the good fight, mate!
yxtuvEM