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| Issabella Doughty courtesy of the Melbourne Age, April 26. |
That has worked, and worked well as man is now at the top of the food chain with its only challenger seemingly being itself.
Immediacy has always had priority, and that is understandable as it is the way of all living things, but in focusing on pressing issues we ignore, with decided peril, that which is distant.
In concert with that we also have misguided habit of spending too much time looking at, thinking about, and therefore wasting psychic energy on, things long gone, rather than assembling today’s activities in a way that will enable tomorrow’s events to unfold positively.
Nothing, or course, is ever certain, but each of us has a role to play, no matter how small, to successfully shape today in the hope that tomorrow will be okay.
I watched with interest as two events recently flooded our local and national media – Easter and Anzac Day – the first being based on a myth and the second, while a reality, is an historical calamity that we should simply consider and move on.
The ideological storms of both those events have anchored us to annual moments in which we recognize what once was and despite the protestations many, do little, or nothing, about engaging with today and therefore tomorrow.
People of all stripes declare that what they want most is world peace, but then those same people, turn out for events at which war is acknowledged and recognized, and people carrying violent and deadly weapons head the parade – it is a strange juxtaposition I don’t understand.
Some will argue that such events don’t glorify war rather; they remind us of the sacrifice that those who died made, and while maybe true, but they do not help us understand the true terror of war - that moment when your life is ripped apart as bullets tear through your chest or the so-called “collateral damage” that leaves a young, innocent girl with a smashed life and bloodied body.
Thinking about the challenges society faces in extricating itself from the intrigues of Easter or Anzac Day, I was confronted by a front page picture in the Melbourne Age on April 26 showing a small girl wearing army clothes, including a slouch hat, and her great-grandfather’s war medals, reminding me of the observation attributed to the co-founder of the Jesuit order, Francis Xavier, said: “Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man”.Whatever life path Issabella Doughty takes, she has already had her first lesson in the violent and perverse mysteries of war.(April 26, 2011)
