July 2016

The hardest piece of news to come out of Nice for me, was the story of an eyewitness describing a baby’s body with its head crushed by the truck. What sort of a monster does this? How can this baby’s parents (if they survived) endure this pain? And for all parents all over the world – regardless of country, race or religion – facing similar horrors, none should ever be put in a position to endure this agony. It’s just too awful for words. And who won in Nice? The Far Right, led by Le Pen, that’s who. And the Far Right is rising everywhere. That should concern all of us greatly. Of course ISIS (Daesh) claimed it, but this claim isn’t stacking up, even if the French President is jumping on the radicalization bandwagon now. He must. His government is at risk. Please read this great piece featured in the New Yorker this weekend – What We Know About the Attacker in Nice. No doubt we can’t seem to cope with lone wolfs or nutters. You can’t do anything about them. You can’t predict them. It’s adding a whole new dimension to our current time of crisis. There is no question in my mind that our world is in chaos and the politics of division and hatred are tearing us apart. We’re all enduring Trump, but did any of us see Brexit coming? Australia elected Pauline Hanson (a pathetic racist), and there are many other unstable political situations around the world demonstrating one thing. Fear is winning. And then the bombs go off. In Istanbul, in Iraq, or the terrible, graphic massacre in Bangladesh. We mourned the victims of the Orlando shooting by a person who appears to be a confused homophobe, and couldn’t believe it when a monster set off bombs in Saudi Arabia at its most holy place, during its most holy time! Cops kill black men in America and then cops get killed by a black man in return. Turkey is just overcoming a military coup where too many civilians died. An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. Horrible people are committing horrible crimes, and they are winning. Fear is winning. It’s awful. Hope feels a long way away and I have always believed in the best of people, always. The vast majority of people are essentially good – no matter where they are from, what religion they follow, or who they love – but there are monsters amongst us. A small handful of bastards who want to drive the world into chaos and drive us apart. And they are winning. We all talk about the threat of ISIS or Daesh and more often than not, they are just claiming involvement. And we lap it up. We believe the media – especially if a Muslim was involved. Only Muslim’s commit terrorism, didn’t you know? Bollocks! And yet fear is a lucrative business. Money, oil, drugs, weapons…. There are many people getting very wealthy while we all cower in fear behind what, safe walls. Really? There haven’t been safe walls since weapons capable of travelling thousands of miles were invented, let alone nuclear weapons. But it’s not just weapons for foreign wars “Since 9/11, the Department of Homeland Security alone has doled out somewhere between $30 billion and $40 billion in direct grants to state and local law enforcement, as well as other first responders.” Look at the police uniforms. Is this really necessary? Are we accepting a police state as normal? And who is benefitting here? The weapons manufacturers? You betcha they are!   I believe we’re teetering very close to war and in war, it is always the little man who dies. The voting public who listen to the media and are influenced by ignorant thinking are always the ones destined for the front line (or their children or grandchildren if they are too old). This demographic is always the cannon fodder of war. They will passionately support war and they will die. It’s how it goes. We often look back at history and wonder how the hell did it happen? How did the Nazi’s get an entire country behind it’s horrific extermination of the Jews? How did the Rwandan genocide happen, where one-day, people woke up and hacked their neighbours to death? It was a slow and insidious process that’s how. It happens step-by-step. Fear-by-fear. That’s how it succeeds. Slowly, the consciousness of the people is filled with this frightening “otherness” and then everything explodes. Can we not see that we are heading in the same direction? Could you see yourself hacking to death the lovely Muslim family living down your road right now? Don’t think you’re capable of it? We have thousands of years of history to show that we are all capable of it. We just need to be a fed a reason and there is none more powerful than the idea of ensuring the safety and survival of one’s family. Afterwards, we’ll cower in shame and guilt that it happened in our country. We’ll lick our wounds, pull our country back together, and eventually, heal as nations. A new “Anne Frank” book will be published and consumed for generations, all trying to learn the lesson. But do we ever really heal from atrocity? Do we ever really learn the lesson? Unfortunately, I don’t think so. I am definitely concerned we are teetering towards WWIII. The first two wars started somewhere far away too, and before we knew it, the whole world was engulfed – in separateness and the full ugliness of humanity turned against each other. We turned a blind eye in the build-up then, are we turning a blind eye now? Let’s look at the refugee’s crisis. Babies are drowning, freezing, being sold into slavery and these future slaves will know nothing else, because their parents are long-dead and cruel people are seizing on this opportunity to snatch innocent lives away. I believe we need to