Footprints

Sometimes the music I listen to inspires an entry and sometimes it just makes me sit and er ... listen to the music. A few seconds ago I was in the latter phase and yet here I am writing about it. Is this meaningful or just pretentious self-reference? I wasn't asking for comments. I won't tell you what the music is.

I am like Zellaby at the end of the Midwich Cuckoos at the moment. Trying to write about anything but one thing. If you look at last year's post for this day you will see that I managed to avoid all reference. By mentioning this avoidance I have not avoided it. I don't hold with celebrating particular dates. If a thing is worth remembering, then it is worth remembering all the time unless of course you are letting that continuous remembrance affect your life. I think you know what I am talking about but I have not mentioned it so I have succeeded as far as you reading this are concerned. Whether I have succeeded in terms of not thinking about it while writing is another matter. The wall is falling. Having said all this, remembrance is for those involved. Do not drag me into using that remembrance as a rallying cry for your own battles; they affect us all anyway. Cluster bombs, Mines - all the same thing.

Somewhere like D-Fens, there is a man - a decent family man who is paid to think up ways of killing people using the most cost-effective means available. Maybe it is a team effort so no one person feels entirely responsible for the actions. Who commissions the weapon? Are they the evil people? Do they have in their mind pictures of what the weapon actually does? They must see the burned flesh and the shattered bodies. They have to be able to think of this or they would not be able to think up the weapons in the first place. What then happens when the request reaches the engineers who have to design and build the equipment? My boss tells me to do things. My company does not make weapons but would I refuse if he asked me to make a weapon I knew would be attractive to children? I hope so. Paint them yellow like toys. Then all the argument is that is to make them easy to find if they don't go off but I say why make them in the first place.

I have said before that I always have problems with the international treaties that make certain weapons illegal. How can a weapon be 'illegal'? Maybe we would end up with hands - two brothers in a straight up fist fight. No - if there is some way of stopping weapons that have a lethality beyond the time in which they are in flight, then we must accept it. Banning the weapons is the only way. Be consistent. All international treaties seem to end up the result of an eternally changing process of negotiation that I find vaguely repugnant. I know it applied to the climate treaties and can imagine that the same thing happens with weapons negotiations. Sort of "we will let you keep your napalm if you let us keep our anti-personnel mines" which glosses over the fact that one change of a sentence means that thousands of Children will die. What would an arms manufacturer do if you asked him what his feelings were about toddlers picking us the products of his industry? Because on this day when so many people are talking about the thing I cannot talk about as the worst thing to happen for years, I can only remember the fact that babies and children are still dying - thousands every year because of these weapons. Where does that come on the scale of bad things?

I like to think I live in a civilised time and on the whole I do. Things like I have been talking about do not affect me particularly. Every day I am grateful that I am not living in the dark ages when life was cheap and law was harsh. And then I look around at what happens in the world and think that for a lot of people, this is the worst time ever. We have the power to make it the best time and we do not use it. Just a tiny shift in the flow of money between various worlds would result in life getting so much better for millions of people. All the bluster and tough talk does nothing. Actions and decent actions are what are required. You may think yourself a decent human being - and here I am going to echo something someone said recently - but we (and I am included), are sort of responsible because we do not complain about it. We can open our eyes in horror but we are grateful that it does not happen to us. We have to find all the ways to make things better. I was going to say "if you are not wish us" but that seems too simplistic. Find you own terms for this but I hope you know what I mean.

I know you all want solutions but don't look for them in other people. The answer lies with compassion and acceptance. We may be all PC internally but our actions in the wider world are difficult to distinguish from racism.
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