Grown Ups Talking

Sitting in the back of beyond, life reverts to simple things. Food, drink, fluctuating weather, the price of milk, these become the major concerns of daily living. It also makes you realize eventually that you are turning into a sheep.

Sheep have a simple life. They eat and sleep, get shorn and occasionally get turned into dinner. They all do what each other is doing and rarely suffer from depression.

In order to jolt myself from this rural stupor, I indulge in the BBC longwave service, where you can get quite good international news.

The issues that strike me the most involve simple things: Courage, and Greed.

Greed keeps popping up. There are the Wall Street/CEO/Jersey politician-rabbis. There are the Rovian Neo-cons who scare civilians into thinking that single-payer healthcare will destroy civilization as we know it — for massive fees and pharmaceutical industry stock options. And there’s power-mongering lunatics like Ahmadenijad, Mugabe, the Burmese Generals.

Then there’s Courage. There’s the Iran protesters risking “medieval torture” to get their grotesque government to accept the real results of their recent election. There’s Aung San Suu Kyi being trotted out for her surreal and evil show-trial in Burma. There’s Lubna Ahmed Hussein in the Sudan who could have avoided arrest through her United Nations job, but chose to quit and go on trial for wearing trousers and risk 40 lashes. Apparently this is commonplace in that country.

Most of us are sheep, we follow the herd. Some stand out as true heroes. Some just want to burn down the farm.—Pomerol