The tragedy of Afghanistan

An Australian warrior was killed recently at the opening of the new fighting season in Afghanistan.
That is distressing, for multiple reasons.

 Sgt Brett Wood, who
 was recenlty killed in
 Afghanistan.

The death of anyone, anywhere and for any reason should be sufficient to make us pause and reflect and, should the relationship be close, weep or at least feel a deep loss and sadness.
However, when the death results from a conflict in which our country should not be involved at all, it is more than distressing, it is a tragedy.
But there is more; to declare a dead soldier, who is simply a beautifully trained and equipped killer, as a warrior elevates him to a metaphorical status of which he is not worthy.
The term warrior elicits, in the imagination, images of one who is honourable, tenacious, courageous, faithful, intelligent and resourceful, and one with whom we would like to stand with when confronted by circumstances that were less than comforting.
Not for a second would I argue that Sgt Brett Wood didn’t have those qualities, but I object to the romantic interpretations of “warrior” being attached to him.
Further, I argue that the intelligence we suggest a warrior has is not something I would attribute to the broad sweep of our number who agreed that people with those skills should be sent to places like Afghanistan.
It is a mistake to describe our trained killers as warriors as in different circumstances they would be before our courts as murderers.
The romantic images that the term warrior summons are most certainly not applicable in a battlefield’s hellish-like realities.
The phrase “the fighting season” also alarms me as it brings a sad normality to the deathly struggles faced in Afghanistan that, in reality, should be extraordinarily rare, rather than as common as “the growing season”.
True, we should acknowledge Sgt Wood’s death and not, from our Prime Minister down, celebrate his dedication and sacrifice as that simply reinforces a culture that finds a perverse satisfaction in violence and war in what it considers the extension of a perceived greater good.
Humankind, one of the rare life forms that will kill its fellows with an irrational pleasure and for reasons that defy its inherent intelligence, is devoid of historical examples in which violence has resolved tensions.
Violence might resolve the immediate, but always brings with it unintended consequences.
Despatching young men and women to obscure places to risk death, to prosecute violence in the name of values not really understood is outrageously wrong.
Even though our values might have once been worthy, they have since been prostituted and corrupted by corporatism and militarism, with our alleged democracy being the realm of the few, rather than the many.
Three more have since died and so the tragedy continues.
(June 7, 2011)

Ideas are not only life's oxygen, but also its currency

Ideas may well be the oxygen of life, but they are also its currency.
Communities rich in ideas are vibrant and exciting places to live and as ideas grow so does the wellbeing of those who call it home.

Art by Veronica Kelly
 at Nathalia's 
G.R.A.I.N. Store.

An idea that had been in gestation for a life-time drew its first breath in Nathalia.
Australian/American artist, humanist and human-rights advocate, Bill Kelly, who received his artistic training at the Philadelphia University of the Arts and the National Gallery School in Melbourne, finally settled with his family in the small community.
The Fulbright Fellow and former Dean of the Victorian College of the Arts, had, buried in his mental luggage, an idea to enrich the community and within that expand and extend the reach of art – the not-for-profit G.R.A.I.N. Store   opened late last year.
Kelly’s idea is about strengthening community (it does), but beyond that, life has generally stalled as there is a paucity of implemented ideas that take people beyond what the rather strictures allowed by the commercial/military/industrial complex.
What exists is essentially focussed on growth that takes little note of the cost, be it in the plundering of the earth’s finite resources or equally in the physical or psychological damage to people.
Most of us claim to have open minds and consequently see ourselves as flexible and able to accommodate changes to our way of life, but immediately that new idea, although possibly ancient, unsettles what may be even unconscious conceptions of right and wrong, a sense of fairness and an understanding of what is seen as the good life, then we begin to harden and our resilience vanishes.
The evolved lifestyle we live today, given a cursory glance, is neither right nor wrong, but it will not stand close examination as it survives only because we are spending the capital earth has accumulated over billions of years.
The Goldilocks years – not too hot, not too cold – have allowed us to benefit from earth’s largesse, but that era’s idea, the idea built around growth and the suppression of the other, is exhausted and we urgently need new ideas.
Fresh and workable concepts, such as transition towns and steady-state economies exist, but their introduction and application require us to embrace new ideas, something that historically is not common.
However, from the perspective of a troubled world threatened by uninhibited growth that has little regard for ecological concerns or the finitude of the earth’s resources, we need to step back from the madness of the Western democracies growth ideologies.
The idea that has sustained us for the past two centuries is dead, or has been shown to be counterfeit, and so the new idea, or the new currency, needs to be about people, rather than things.