Friday, December 12, 2008
12 December 2008
Yesterday president Mugaba of Zimbabwe denied there was any cholera in his country.
In spite of the fact that many thousands are dying as a result of the collapse of the country's sanitation services; and the collapse of its health care systems.
Today one of his ministers said there was cholera, but it had nothing to do with them. It is a genocidal weopon being deployed by the U.K. because it is still hell-bent on recolonising Zimbabwe.
There could be something very comic, in a horribly macabre kind of way, about all this if the suffering in that country were not so intense... or if the attitude behind it were not so utterly prevalent.
The captain of a small, horribly overcrowded boat making the crossing from the Horn of Africa to the Arabian peninsula, when confronted by the fact that several people had died on his boat, suffocated in the hold where he forced them to stay, said it was not his fault. If he didn't keep them in the hold the boat would capsize.
Motorists in Manchester, offerred the option to change their means of transport into the city and do something about the horrendous congestion have just voted by an overwhelming majority not to accept a road charge. That would have enabled them to claim billions of government money to improve their public transport network.
Meanwhile the government which may or may not accept that something has to be done is frightened to doit itself and wants to force/bribe the voters to do it.
The EU is trying to hammer out a deal to decrease greenhouse gases. There's a UN meeting on the subject going on in Poland; the Poles along with everyone else, are no doubt in agreement about all this as long as they don't have to do anything about it themselves. Because most of their power comes from coal.
And a friend of mine just sends me his Christmas letter. He would no doubt consider himself an environmentally aware and responsible person; yet an item in his letter bemoans the fact they had to scrap one of their two cars.
Our collective inability to take action in the face of all the crises that confront us is utterly terrifying.
So I go upstairs and do my Christmas cards, and send off my little Christmas letter... and I know that once upon a time I would have written that quite scornfully, as if angrily aware of the futility of my actions and my helplessness, too, in the face of it all.
But I realise that at this particular moment there actually nothing else I can do: and trying to send off good positive wishes has to be better than nothing.
Yesterday president Mugaba of Zimbabwe denied there was any cholera in his country.
In spite of the fact that many thousands are dying as a result of the collapse of the country's sanitation services; and the collapse of its health care systems.
Today one of his ministers said there was cholera, but it had nothing to do with them. It is a genocidal weopon being deployed by the U.K. because it is still hell-bent on recolonising Zimbabwe.
There could be something very comic, in a horribly macabre kind of way, about all this if the suffering in that country were not so intense... or if the attitude behind it were not so utterly prevalent.
The captain of a small, horribly overcrowded boat making the crossing from the Horn of Africa to the Arabian peninsula, when confronted by the fact that several people had died on his boat, suffocated in the hold where he forced them to stay, said it was not his fault. If he didn't keep them in the hold the boat would capsize.
Motorists in Manchester, offerred the option to change their means of transport into the city and do something about the horrendous congestion have just voted by an overwhelming majority not to accept a road charge. That would have enabled them to claim billions of government money to improve their public transport network.
Meanwhile the government which may or may not accept that something has to be done is frightened to doit itself and wants to force/bribe the voters to do it.
The EU is trying to hammer out a deal to decrease greenhouse gases. There's a UN meeting on the subject going on in Poland; the Poles along with everyone else, are no doubt in agreement about all this as long as they don't have to do anything about it themselves. Because most of their power comes from coal.
And a friend of mine just sends me his Christmas letter. He would no doubt consider himself an environmentally aware and responsible person; yet an item in his letter bemoans the fact they had to scrap one of their two cars.
Our collective inability to take action in the face of all the crises that confront us is utterly terrifying.
So I go upstairs and do my Christmas cards, and send off my little Christmas letter... and I know that once upon a time I would have written that quite scornfully, as if angrily aware of the futility of my actions and my helplessness, too, in the face of it all.
But I realise that at this particular moment there actually nothing else I can do: and trying to send off good positive wishes has to be better than nothing.
Labels: world madness
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