Blindfolds and Cotton Wool

On the phone, my ma told me the story of two of the men from my dad's work, one young one old, who went fishing one day and never came home.

On the way back, their fibreglass boat capsized, and while most of them swam to shore, three disappeared, later to be declared missing, later to be found dead. Of the three, two worked for my dad; of the two, the body of one has not been found.

And when I hung up I remembered how lucky I was and how sometimes it is all too easy to forget this, especially in the western world where we are blindfolded and wrapped in cotton wool, and even though there is a sexual predator on the loose it's okay because young girls, thanks to their twelve months of kickboxing training, are able to fight him off.

What's a tragedy in our world? Every day we watch the news and every day we hear about soldiers and civilians that are killed by the hundreds, and do we think twice about them? Do we wonder about their families, their mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, their children?

Instead, we go around blaming our own families - who borrowed our clothes or grounded us when they found our underage drinking licenses - of ruining our lives.

I know that it's all relative and that we'll never understand the plight of a dead soldier's family, or that of the starving children in Africa, or indeed that of the wife and children whose husband and father has drowned in an innocent fishing accident.

In fact, it would be offensive and unreasonable of us to pretend that we even had an inkling of an idea of how it is for them, but can't we at least try and appreciate how good we have it? Can't we at least realise that caring about an island of massacred seals and koalas injured in a bush fire are luxuries that the people of Iraq can not afford?

Yes, how cruel the man was who clobbered an island of defenceless seals, yet how brave the man is who has uprooted an entire nation and sent thousands of young men running to their death, let's support him, let's vote for these people because they'll make sure that our seals are safe from psychos and our koalas from natural disasters.

Let's hate our lives, whine about the trivial things that make them so bad and whine about how things will never be perfect for us; let's abuse God because he hasn't given us the living we never wanted to work for, and let's condemn everyone based on the heresay of the media.

Let's all be angus, and let's pass that on to our children. Let's all breed a race of ignorance, stupidity and racism. Let's raise the next generation of seal murderers, and then wonder what's wrong with people.

Because, you know, we're good at that.

previous - next; thanks, diaryland.