We see weeds in a garden, we think destruction,
for our patch is our kingdom; automatic reaction.
Is this a white cross I see, or a weed that wouldn’t be but for its dark surroundings?
For each perceived weed there are crosses, leading to choices, and new beginnings.
Leaves and thorns for the Winter,
but when Spring comes shining
out burst the flowers as if laughing,
with promises of fruits and Summer.
At your peril
These are worrying times for Europe again.
French economist Thomas Pikketty speaking to a German newspaper reminds us all that Germany is where it is now thanks to its debt cancellation after the wars. A very interesting article.
“A restructuring of all debt, not just Greece is inevitable”
A restructuring of Europe is inevitable, whether politicians, lobbies and people on the street can agree which way it needs to go is another matter. Thorny times indeed.
I’m reading about the 60’s. In America. Kennedy got killed last week. Ken Follett’s ‘Edge of Eternity’.
Yesterday, by the time Martin Luther King was standing on that balcony, smiling, I knew he was about to be killed.
And then I watched the news. Was it really 50 years ago that American people fought for equal rights? A man went into a sacred place and killed nine people; with some kind of gun, killed them for being Black. In 2015.
Let’s get straight to the point:
racism and gun culture kept alive because it makes economic sense to some.
This is the US, with a Black American president. I don’t know if back in the 60’s many negroes, as African Americans were called then, thought it would take 50 years to have a couple in the White House that happens to have black skin.
A couple that will soon be able to talk openly and more loudly about race; and guns issues.
Finally.
Properly.
Hopefully.
I mean properly talk from the heart. Many have talked before, white people can talk passionately about racial equality too. Many have acted before, not just talked, been killed for their beliefs like Andrew Goodman, a white American who went to Mississippi in the 60’s and never came back because the Ku Klux Klan got in the way. It still exists the KKK you know. According to the BBC there are 19 white supremacists groups just in South Carolina.
I can’t help but wonder if we can quite fully understand what it’s like to have people thinking that we are less than them, as in, not quite human, only good enough for proper dirty jobs, and then some, because for some white people, even that’s not quite enough, for them black people are not worthy of being alive.
“Problem is” said my son the other day “some people think they are better than others, and it gives them the right in their head to do stuff like kicking a woman in the stomach”. Or think white supremacy. Or see for ourselves how this killer was arrested standing up, handcuffed and led by a policeman, whilst the kid who had a hand gun was shot by a stressed out policeman. Dead.
This is a country where guns are the norm, the right to protect body and home is so ingrained, so repeated, so filmed, so accepted by so many, you get powerful people who want to keep things going as they are forever more. For some reason.
Thing is, my Goddaughter’s father is Black. He’s not African American, he’s English, or British, or even European. Whatever. His mother is a retired nurse who came over from Grenada. Proper hard working, a carer incarnate.
Her granddaughter traveled to the States recently. “I can’t breathe” said Eric Garner to the policeman. “That could have been my Dad” said my Goddaughter. Looking me in the eye, angry, helpless, worried, not understanding how this behaviour, this way of thinking still happens in 2015. That policeman is trained, drilled, stressed, his culture is macho. Who wants peace and love when you can push gadgets and weapons?
You don’t understand this kind of behaviour when you’re young. Some old fools like me still don’t.
That’s the thing. It’s not just shocking. There’s no two ways about it, some people are being treated differently in 2015 for the colour of their skin, or their religion whilst little kids don’t give two hoots about colour, beliefs, or how big the other kid’s house is. Not a flying monkey about differences. They’ll notice, they’ll comment, and move on.
Fact. Description.
Why?
Answer. Next game.
I can’t wait for Barack Obama to be an ex-president. Maybe I’ve been more attentive since Ferguson, maybe I do think this could be my Goddaughter being pinned down by a policeman for going to a pool party, but it seems that the closer to the end of his presidency he gets, the more Obama talks about racism, and guns.
Once he is no longer a head of state, I hope he will start really talking. He’s hinting, he’s opening the discussions best he can, stuck as he is between Congress and the American people, split as both of them are.
It was the same in the 60’s. Love and peace, whilst a senseless war was killing thousands on the other side of the world. Never on the doorstep the wars, just the senseless killing of innocents. There were protests on the streets in the 60’s, there was silence about wars and racial hatred elsewhere. There were screwballs who happened to be perfect shots snippers.
So what has changed?
Communication has changed. Hiding of facts and behaviour has become a damn side more difficult. “Love is stronger than hate” said Chris Singleton whose mother was killed in that church on Thursday, less than 24 hours before he spoke in the middle of a stadium. Inspiring indeed.
The top of the mountain is getting nearer. Free at last?
What does Brexit mean for the Europeans who have lived in the UK for thirty years?
said my Canadian classmate astonishment in her voice. We were in History 101. I was in Quebec for one year, and at High School I had been taught the whole … Continue reading “Don’t you have Indians in your history?”
First published on The Lady Shed on 1/5/15
“Problem with you Mum, you’re an extremist”
That stopped me in my tracks. Driving along in my automobile, on a West Dorset lane, hedges ensuring I can only look ahead, no views of what’s happening in the fields around me. I didn’t slam on the brakes, but I sure was stunned into silence for a second.
“What do you mean I am an extremist?”
“You always go on about the Americans. That is extremist Mum”.
He was a bit angry with me. He loves America, the skateboarding, the rap music, the series on tv and all that stuff on YouTube. He doesn’t watch the news too much, that’s always the same old stuff of no interest to him whatsoever. Like so many adults who have given up on lis’ning.
And he sure has a way to get straight to the point, that boy of mine. And stop me in my tracks. He makes me think. He makes me readjust my ways. And I want to listen. Kids are not as blinded by economic beliefs that have been misinterpreted by a society on steroids along a motorway with hedges so high we can’t see any fields that may look different.
When so many teenagers I listen to see little hope of a bright future in this country, I wonder where we are heading. Just like the next person.
Starting from the system as we know it, our current base, the jungle out there, I can’t help but conclude that we will need dramatic changes in the long term if we are ever to live in that more balanced world philosophers have been writing about for centuries. For changes in the short and medium term, if we are to achieve any long term goals of rebalancing Society, maybe we do need to think about a few extremist ideas.
Yet I keep hearing that people don’t like change.
It makes me very angry when the Conservative Party’s manifesto states in the first paragraph “Labour’s Great Recession”. It worries me no end that the MP where I live has written a book entitled “How to privatise everything”. It astounds me that he writes policies with the help of seconded employees from KPMG and their like, even more so that our laws allow him -and many others- to do so. And then you have France riddled with endless strikes and equally filled with food banks. Economics and balance sheets are the only reality of life, it seems. “I didn’t leave Labour, Labour left me” said a Scotsman from Inverclyde, a typical Labour constituency near Glasgow, interviewed by the World Tonight on Radio 4 on 29 April 2015.
Is he the only one thinking this?
Take calculator, add person A = £6,210 a year salary to person B = £1,865,999 a year, divide by two and you’ll get an average that means the country is doing great, thanks. It means bugger all, how does that deal with poverty? I’m useless at maths but if the top paid earn forever more and the low paid earns a tiny bit more thanks to tax cuts, then when you average their salaries the number will be bigger. Recovery we hear, but for who? Cuts to vulnerable people’s benefits have lead to deaths. In 2015, in Britain or France. How can this be?
More importantly, where do we go from here?
In our black and white world, it seems that if I speak up against ‘the Americans’ I must be Red Nat. I must be against Obama. If I go on about the danger of corporations acting as a monopoly I must be antibusiness. If I speak up about Israel, I must be antisemite. Therefore I must be racist. Therefore I must be derided, attacked, bullied, silenced. Which is pretty much how the media have been able to conduct their affairs up to now. And allowed to tell people who they should vote for. For goodness sake, why are these non-dom media barons allowed to get away with such blatant political bias?
Yes things are changing, people are engaging in politics when given half a chance, as the Scottish referendum has shown. People are turning to alternative media for news thanks to the internet. McDonalds are closing outlets, Tesco is struggling (on paper). What happens next? Will they pay their small suppliers even later? These dangers have been forecasted for years, by extremists on the left, yet they have mainly been ignored by Westminster Cabinet Inc. The old school media meanwhile is peddling the same old hatred to divide us to smithereens.
Benefit scroungers vs the rich, public sector workers vs private, countryside vs cities, good old days of the Empire vs ignoring the young, disabled vs the lucky ones, Eastern European vs proper British, hard working families vs lazy single parents (we can only assume). Oh and religions, obviously, nothing like a good old established subject of division and hatred. Always works that one. And that was before we even started the election.
Now we’re in overdrive. When a woman suddenly inspires not only Scotland but also English voters, all hands on deck. She’ll be working with that Welsh one as well. And heaven forbid the Aussie one with mad ideas. She and the other two must be taken down: if we are to be Great or British, we must remain a Union, we must therefore ensure those self-centered Scots stay back where they belong, north of the border. And The Sun happily backs the SNP North of the Border, and treat them like terrorist scum South of the border.
And I’m an extremist?
I have a beautiful roof over my head, I live in a stunning area and I’m angry. I’ve never been hungry, but I’m scared. When more and more ‘haves’ think that Conservatives have gone too far, won’t vote for somebody who won’t tell them where those damn £12bn cuts will come from; when they can see for themselves how this witch hunt of the have-nots-who-must-all-be-scroungers hits the old industrial areas like Cornwall; when the scroungers off the top have not gone anywhere near a judge, let alone a prison, and nowhere near enough the coffers of HMRC whilst the rest of us keep filling that big black hole to pay for:
then please forgive me for worrying from my utopian cloud. I understood (wrongly) free market to mean something a bit more balanced, a bit less authoritarian from the corporations who want yet more power in Europe with TTIP so they can sue governments if their balance sheet gets hit by:
TTIP is being negotiated in secret, now, and the main parties are in favour of ‘business’. When was TTIP mentioned in the elections?
And I’m not even talking about climate change, a subject that has been as good as absent in these elections too.
If we cut benefits from the poorest yet more, won’t there be even more anger? Would we not likely have more riots like in the States, like in New Orleans, still not recovered from the devastating hurricane ten years ago, even before racism is taken into account?
Do we want to become more like the States and their Senate that blocks the President from moving in the direction he was elected to go towards because a small number of people can spend millions on political campaigns, anti-climate-change ‘scientific research’ aimed at the ‘left’s conspiracy theories’, the Fox News and Tea Party of this world…
That’s why my son calls me an extremist about Americans. He’s not the only one. And I understand what he means. Out of context, I sound like a communist. In our current world, I’m just worried that we are like a car on a West Dorset lane going way too fast, heading for a tractor that we cannot see but is firmly around the corner.
Then what?
I have a vision of blondie Boris and his water cannons, a couple of years from now, you know the ones, acquired cheap from Germany without permission from government. That gives me a vision of his type of leadership, apart from his jokey way of talking to people like they’re idiots, like he knows better and will do what it takes to get his way. If authority is what we’re after, he’ll do a great job. Authority scares me because when it does not listen, it becomes totalitarian.
It does not let me talk.
If I want to go and protest in London about fracking I might end up kettled for hours by some private company like G4S, end up at the wrong end of that water cannon, maybe sent to a Serco private jail that needs to make a profit, if I get injured it may be Virgin that looks after me and if I end up with a nervous breakdown due to massive stress because I find our society frighteningly out of hand but don’t want to just ignore it because it is my children’s future, well, who knows who will look after me?
At the moment in West Dorset, people with mental issues who end up at the top of a cliff out of despair are taken in a police car to Poole, an hour away. Because there’s no money to help them significantly, they’re ‘released’, they go back to the cliff, the police has to pick them up again, and again, hopefully as the alternative is at the bottom of the cliff, and yet police numbers are decreasing.
Where do we go from here?
There are many alternative roads from the established ways, if only we get a chance to look at them properly, analyse their proposals fairly, and work out a more balanced way forward. From Positive Banking that invests in small businesses, to enabling community Green Energy so we never rely on monopolies and foreign countries anymore, surely humans are clever enough to build a better society learning from the mistakes of the past?
In my search for a fairer world for my children away from finance capitalism, totalitarian communism or corporate socialism…
am I really an extremist?
It’s all about Scotland this election isn’t? How did that happen. The Scots had a democratic vote and they said no to independence. And here they are again. Holding the balance … Continue reading The balance of power: England or Scotland?
It’s not just that I’m a compassionate kind of girl. It’s that my great-grandparents took a fishing boat and headed for a better life across the Mediterranean. All those years ago. Their story is a story that does not belong to history books; you know, the school ones.
That bit of Balearic blood in my veins from these ancestors of mine is churning in my stomach. I see all these people on flimsy boats, portrayed as a group, and I think about each individual, the ones that we don’t see.
I can’t help it.
I think about that warm sea, holidays for so many, home to me, the view up the hill behind my sister’s home, the sailing with my brother, and I think about the people, portrayed as statistics because when far away from our own shores, we can’t relate to them, they are effectively numbers that need housing, feeding, jobs, land.
30 times more migrants across the sea this year than last year.
What next? What can we do?
We can’t help the whole world can we?
But my ancestors,
they were not numbers.
Nobody’s ancestors are numbers.
So I can’t help but feel sick about the whole migrants in the Med situation. My great-grandparents weren’t escaping a war, it was a case of economics. They were hungry. A country across the sea offered a better life, they took their chances. As millions have for centuries, across oceans, deserts and mountains.
Irish, Scots, English, Welsh, Spanish, French, the list is endless.
As sure as the waves on the shore come and go, so do people.
Off my great-grandparents went on a fishing boat, not sure where they would land, no idea what their tomorrow would bring. The winds and the currents determined where they and many more families landed, and settled. No trafficker heading for a specific spot, at enormous cost to the desperate. I have not researched my family’s history in great detail, their tomorrow, my past. But these migrants catapulted into my mind the very little I do know about my own history. Little snippets deeply buried. Painful past families do not dwell on.
Except when history books paint a different story. Out comes the past, shouted in anger in a free country, whispered with no witness elsewhere.
My ancestors’ new life brought land, something in short supply on a small island. They farmed the virgin land, created a small vineyard, had a few animals, a close family and they employed local people to farm the land; farming for them, with them, depending how you want to portray it, those little words that make all the difference to English meaning.
With.
For.
But that land.
Who did it belong to?
Politicians told my family it was theirs. Thing is, if you get offered a chance to a better life, and you’re seriously down in the dumps, you’ll believe the promises won’t you?
I would.
Something new across the sea; hope.
Then, some seventy years later, the president of the land came along in the main city and spoke to all who had gathered. It felt like the whole city was out, and the villages around had come to see him. On that balcony. As statesmen do, loud and clear, he addressed a large crowd who were worried for their livelihood; and most importantly, their life. I imagine his arms stretched open in front of him, reaching out to the people, voice commanding:
“I understand you”.
Said the big man. Big cheers from the crowd. Hope renewed. Oh yes, the man could talk to people. He’s got it, they thought. My parents barely in their twenties listening in hope. They applauded. He understands us. He’ll look after us.
Four years later, they were summoned to leave the land. After a civil war.
Not that the politicians ever called it a war. Oh no. It was ‘the events’. Events that killed my grandfather. Not the son of the ones that came on that Spanish boat. No, these expats had come on a French boat. And he was married to a woman whose family had come on a boat all the way from Malta.
So when I start talking about politics or the unfairness of the system, and I sound like I’m shouting, or I look like a mad woman possessed by some kind of way-out-there passionate ideal, when I get agitated, or I am perceived as rude, or preaching…
I am sorry.
Tis my Mediterranean blood. I can’t change that. It boils inside, and sometimes it boils over. Not with weapons. I’m civilised. And I’m a woman. And I’ve heard the stories of that war. Like any war, the family stories are never stories you want to dwell on. It’s just that I just boil over with words when I see a pattern of history. Said, or written.
Or I keep very quiet, and bite my lip. My soft lower lip.
But who cares about my personal history?
It’s just a story. It’s just what makes me who I am. Just like you.
I find every history interesting, it helps me understand the person, not judge the person, understand the person, or the nation, or the wars. Answer the why. Like a child that does not want to grow up.
Maman… Pourquoi…?
We all think what we think, and think how we think, because of our personal history.
Understanding the past best we can, to untangle the present, helps get a better idea of what is likely to happen tomorrow. Non?
I have not learnt English history with no deviation from the accepted norm, nor French history for that matter. De Gaulle made sure of that. What I learnt at school was quite a different story than what I heard at home, as far as this colossus of French history is concerned. And that made me question institutions from a very young age. Not with weapons or thoughts of anarchy. I was lucky. I am lucky, I have never lived in a country at war at home. I just have observations, the very rare stories from my grandmother, the even rarer hints from my mother, the rage from my father whose father and brother were killed in the back whilst ploughing the family’s field, and coming across stories from survivors and from governments.
Just thoughts, just words.
De Gaulle let my parents down. He made a statement that gave his people hope. And meant nothing. “I understand you”. Still, they had to leave their home behind, my grandmother had to live with her children for the rest of her life, gone was her home across the sea, my grandparents’ home, the memories in the attic I never had, off they went to mainland France.
Their country.
They were French in Algeria. That was the deal. Not that French people on the mainland saw it like that mind. Not welcome. Not one bit. Signs on shop windows making it quite clear that they could not enter. Each and every one million of them. All in one go. 1962. Quite a year in French history. Not that it was ever mentioned by my history teachers in the 70’s or 80’s you understand.
I was born on the mainland. Yet in France’s statistics, I am a Pied Noir descendent. Therefore a Pied Noir, a French ‘repat’ from Algeria (repatriated).
A forever outsider with Mediterranean blood in my veins.
And that’s absolutely fine by me.
My mixed blood makes me who I am, makes my ‘English’ children who they are.
There is nothing wrong with me, or them.
There is nothing wrong with any of us.
Whatever blood flows in our veins.
Wherever we happened to be born.
What’s the story of these migrants on the Med today?
I wonder what Bob Marley would say?
First posted on The Lady Shed 6/3/15 Further to Sophia’s article on Halal meat and Maddie’s article on humanity, I wondered what we understand when we say humane or what … Continue reading Advanced civilisation or barbaric?
Pardon my Franglais 