Again Thinking

So ends another year. The world has not become a better place and many more will die of war, starvation and disease in the coming year, as they did in 2006. As individuals we will all have had our high points and our low points. We will continue to talk of Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan, North Korea and maybe add to this list of troubled spots.

What compassion can/must one have for those who through no fault of their own are born in the so called undeveloped countries and find themselves victims of history, geography, avarice and brutality? We who have the chance to be living in reasonable security and comfort take it for granted and sometimes feel (in unguarded moments of which we are probably ashamed) that those who suffer thus must have deserved it in some way - perhaps because they believe other than what we believe, perhaps because they accept doctrines other than what we know for a fact to be given truth.

It is always easier to condemn someone if we can persuade ourselves of their inhumanity and inherent evil. But unfortunately this is a coin with a reverse side. We are the other side of someone else's coin and seen as the evil ones who will get their come uppance one day. What shock and horror!

We speak of globalisation as a done thing, with the ubiquitous trousers and shirts and blouses and skirts and most of all jeans rolling over robes, kimonos, mundus, loin cloths, saris, baju kurongs,kebayas,etc in the wake of two hundred years of colonization and the cultural annexation by a global language. For trade, of course and the greater good and who cares that age old languages and dialects die and cultures wither.

We the privileged are able to mouse over to anywhere and click into futures that were once science fiction. And play poker online. We can order, pay and receive without leaving home. We speak of the internet as the democratization of peoples forgetting the billions who have neither the infrastructures (water for one, electricity, sanitation) nor the means to afford what for us is instant access to everything.

So yes as this year ends I am sitting at my keyboard saddened by my own hypocrisies - I have spent a quarter century working in these so called developing countries and seen it all at first hand and cannot deny what exists: the dirt, the grime, the sickness, the poverty, corruption, brutality etc etc. But also the dignity, the joy of being alive, the compassion of one for the other, the love, the aspiration for better things.

When aspirations are smashed, old beliefs which are wielded by those who would revert to darker times (because those were times of power and hope) may prove beacons against a globalisation that does not care........

Years end, Years begin

We go on...


Wind

and on the coast
a wind, not high or strong
moves along the surface
gathering momentum to howl
fury worked from resentment.
this storm breaks bonds, tendons
forged in furnaces; bellows in hand
a misshapen god stokes embers -
calloused hands and vengeance run
molten metal into the mould
fate conceived.

invincible the armour, unsurpassed.
sandal firm against the heel,
the heart of death almost full
save only his own, the sand was warm.
and blood,
quivering like the javelin thrown
resurrects for one moment,
achilles, alone.

from After the Hard Hours, this Rain, Woodrose Publications, Singapore 1975