Glob-a-log

Strange days indeed, as John Lennon sang - not all that long before some low life loser shot him dead.

So, while it’s raining Batmen, South-African pagans are dancing round Royal Guard soldiers who bite the heads off of chicken.

(And hamsters with Viagra hard-ons discover that you don’t even get the chance to grab yourself some jet lag before a horde of demented killer bees attack your plane.)

Still, most of this week’s news was business as usual - with most people not being content to lead their own little lives but always trying to stop other people from doing whatever they want to do. We are, I’m afraid, not so much homo sapiens as homo querulus.

In Switzerland the right wing, majority party wants to forbid the placement of minarets on mosques. Admittedly, those Osama onions can be real pests and they breed like rabbits - I kid you not. Poor beleaguered Switzerland by now is covered with TWO mosques with minarets!!! Dreadful, ain’t it?

In Australia they are, of course, always in search of new groups to exterminate or simply persecute. Since so many Aboriginals are now in full DIY spring, drinking themselves into an early grave, it isn’t much fun to go after them any more. Shooting kangaroos was also quite pleasant for a while but as victims they did lack a certain See what I bagged myself, me, macho man, me? appeal.

All the illegal immigrants by now are safely locked away in Quantanamo-like camps, so what group was there left to bother? Well, this one bar has found a new group to pick on.

In the US of A, of course, nobody is minding their own business any more. The government is spying on its citizens and when its citizens are not trying to kill each other, they are seeing each other - in court. The most popular sport remains, as ever, the colour game.

When, for instance, Disney’s The Lion King came out, one action group immediately started to ‘count’ the voice-over voices: how many of these voices were black, how many white - and how many black voices were wearing, so to speak, white hats and vice versa?

So, it’s no wonder that questions were raised immediately about the new movie by Pitt and Jolie. The main querulous question being, of course, if Angelina Jolie should not be crucified for daring to play a woman of colour in this new movie.

Ah well, as the man said, So it goes.

Still, since mankind does have enough real and serious problems, wouldn’t it be nice if people could stop obsessing about all these little nonsense issues? You know - folks, give it a rest; be cool. Let your neighbours do with his wife, manservant, maidservant, ox, donkey and what have you, whatever the hell they want to do.

Do as Jane Hirshfield advises: go to the park, sit on a bench, look at the pond through non-meddlesome eyes:

But perhaps
the heart
does not want
to be understood.
Your shadow
falls on the pond
and the small fish
hurry away.
They have
their own lives,
not yours,
which they love.

And if to you
it is anger,
bewilderment,
grief,
to them
it is simply life:
their mouths
open and close,
their gills,
they are fed,
they breathe.

The gods
are not large,
outside us.
They are the fish,
going on
with their own concerns.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 29th, 2007 at 15:23 and is filed under Columns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.