Remembrance Day 2013

We reflect on the lessons of war and life and go silent at the the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. This is the day we listen to one of the greatest and most moving songs ever written – “No Man’s Land” sung by Eric Bogle – young Willie McBride, dead in 1916.

And on the news last night Tony Abbott is boasting of his cruelty to asylum seekers, and announcing, wait for it $400,000 (yes not $400 million !) to assist victims of the worst hurricane in recorded history -and in the same breath, urging the people we have elected to withdraw the most enlightened piece of legislation we have ever passed in the Parliament.

And I just came across the piece I  wrote when I was in America campaigning/ begging George Bush not to start the war in Iraq

Remembrance Day 2004 on the coming war in Iraq. THE VOTE FOR BUSH

“Dies irae, dies illa

Solvet saeclum in favilla.”

Let me level with you from the start. I am angry at the election of George Bush.

And let me pull rank as well. I am a qualified Christian Theologian with my degree hanging on my wall.

And let me lay my cards on the table. I am deeply agnostic.  I am not certain of the nature of God, or the existence of God in any sense normally understood. That is where I stand on belief.

But people don’t talk about beliefs much these days, they tend to talk about values.

I admit to being a values christian, a cultural Christian if you like. I am comfortable with the Christian thirst for justice, for compassion, for tolerance, for kindness, for peacemaking, for respect for even the least brethren. I was brought up on worker priest Pere Joseph Cardijn’s  Dignity of the Human Person, Pope John XXIII’s Pacem in Terris on Human Rights. I was highly motivated by the Christopher movement’s “Better to light one candle than curse the darkness”. I was inspired by Pierre Tielhard de Chardin’s Divine Millieu in which he argues that we must accept evil, whilst never ceasing to fight against it. I love all that stuff. It is part of me.

So I am infuriated at the “Christians” who voted for Bush, at the preachers who preached for Bush.

Research declares that 21% of those who voted for Bush did so on the strength of his stand against abortion, gay marriage and stem cell research – all highly disputed moral positions, which matter little in the context of the continuous killing.

There appeared to be no consciousness at all  that Bush violated the universally agreed tenets of the JUST WAR – expounded by Aquinas, and agreed to by almost everyone. The main Christian tenet here is that war is a LAST RESORT.

As Jimmy Carter pointed out – Bush did not go into war as a last resort. It was almost a first resort.

And he went to war against the wrong enemy!

And with the siege of Fallujah happening as I write this, he will compound his crimes.

And everyone who voted for him will share his sin and his guilt.

There are now

1000 + Americans dead

100,000 Iraqis dead.

This  COULD HAVE BEEN AVOIDED.

101 thousand dead means hundreds of thousands of blind, limbless, disabled, castrated.

This means as well hundreds of thousands of traumatised, psychologically damaged people, including Americans and their families.

WHERE ARE THE CHRISTIANS?

What happened to the parable of the Good Samaritan? Where are the followers of the Jesus who had compassion on the dead, the sick, and the troubled?

What happened to their beautiful New Testament slogan. “As long as you did it to one of these, my least brethren, you did it to me.”

To paraphrase Shylock:

“Don’t the Iraqi’s have eyes, hands, organs,

dimensions, senses, affections, passions?

Are they not fed with the same food,

hurt with the same weapons?

subject to the same diseases,

healed by the same means,

cooled and warmed by the same winter and summer

as Christians are?

If you prick them do they not bleed?

If you poison them do they not die?

And if you wrong them,

will they not seek revenge?”

(ack.Shakespeare)

—

In the vote for Bush, in the Karl Rove play on harmful simplicities, the values are all wrong, the priorities inverted, the minds twisted.

Can anyone seriously imagine Jesus, or Paul, or Francis of Assisi, or Martin Luther King , or Mahatma Ghandi, or Nelson Mandela wasting their vote and their preoccupation on gays in the bedroom while people are being killed; children are having their eyes blown out, and their arms blown off?

And where are the Americans who believe in the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the Constitution – how can they sleep one night when Guantanamo Bay violates everything their country stands for. As Americans, how can they, why did they, vote for Bush?

And Bush’s record of capital punishment in Texas? What does that say about the sanctity of life? You fight about the rights of the seed, at the same time as you chop down the tree?

I look at him and I know he has not suffered pain or death. He does not understand. I do not see him in hospitals visiting the blinded, the armless, the legless, the shattered.

21% of persons declared they voted for Bush, because he is an American and a Christian. Do they mean that a Christian can dismiss all this suffering and define Christianity as the defence of a doubtful theory of the beginning of life, and how some people relate in the bedroom — in a way that harms or threatens no one.

The words of Paul keep ringing in my ears:-

“There is neither Jew nor Greek,

there is neither slave nor free man,

there is neither male nor female;

for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Galatians 3.28

—

So is there American or Iraqi with God?

Is there Muslim or Christian?

is there Jew or Palestinian?

Is there hetero or homosexual?

– did not the Lord God make them all?

And all this is compounded by the violation of Ancient Mesopotamia, the birthplace of  Western Civilisation. Two American wars have meant the further destruction of the ancient sites of Ur, Uruk, Babylon, Nineveh and the many places of Jewish and Christian and Muslim heritage.

— This crime does not even rate a mention.

I find it hard to believe that people were so dumb as to fall for the shallow Karl Rove slogans so obviously built on fear and tribal prejudice.

Bush’s election means that he is now holding his own poisoned chalice. As he drinks it, he may realise that God is not on his side. He might even share John Kerry’s hope, and wished he would have been on God’s side.

Schoolyard bullies get a shock when the unexpected “weak” person stands up to them in the school yard. President Barack Obama has turned himself inside out for five years wanting to “reach out” to “both sides of the aisle” to do good things for the “American people”. (“American people” is like God -always on the side of the politician who is speaking.)

So the Tea Party Republicans, all of whom have health insurance (natch), really wanted to stop this black man giving away their money to help the sick.

So having listened to him talk about cooperation for five years, they hatched a plan to strike down his Obamacare in return for funding the government. They created their our-side-your-side choice and then called for “cooperation” to “sit down with us and negotiate”.

“Be reasonable Mr President, we will let the government proceed — just cross out spending our money helping sick people who do not deserve it.”

But we, who knew the story from day one,  recognized that this was moment that the weak kid was going to stand up to the bully and give him a bloody nose. The bully did not have the intelligence to understand the unspoken sentence –

“My mother died from cancer because she couldn’t pay the medical bills.”

The countdown took place on Tuesday October 2, 2013 at the Star Event vast big room near Darling Harbour (actually it is the Casino). It was red carpet and all. There were easily a thousand guests.

Towards the end, as actor Russell Crowe opened the envelopes (sort of), it was anyone’s award (points are secretly stacked away during the season). Cooper Cronk – brilliant dedicated player from the Melbourne Storm received 28 points for the season. Three wonderful players tied for second – Jonathan Thurston, Daly Cherry-Evans, and Todd Carney. (The older bloke in the photo is me.)

Don’t get me wrong. When a baby is born in my family, or in the family of a friend I love, I share the joy of new life. I was one of those celebrants (led by the late Elizabeth Woodburn) who pioneered Naming Ceremonies for secular people, and made them better and better. We enhanced and defined the role of godparents, and included grandparents in these ceremonies for the first time in human history. (I should mention that anticipated life spans for men have gone from 45 to 84 in the last 100 years.)

And I am not talking against refugees either. I am an agnostic, but a Christian one, and I believe in the corporal works of mercy*. (Didn’t Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott, so called Christians, hack that list to pieces in the Australian Parliament.) I believe that people who come to us for help should be helped, just like the Turks and the Jordanians are helping the hundreds of thousands of Syrians as I write. (Looks like Islam is beating Christianity hands down on that one.)

But there is no denying that every child born in the world needs the resources of the planet – and like of all of us is contributing to its destruction. When one reads that the average number of children born to African women is 5.4, and that the average woman in Niger has 7 children, and that African young men in the tens of thousands are sailing across the Mediterranean in leaky boats to Spain and Italy in desperation for food and work, one knows there is something badly wrong.

On the local scale, in my city of Melbourne, the developers fund both political parties so that no one dares says a word, even though the roads are congested, public transport is crowded, and the rest of our infrastructure is bursting at the seams.

Sure a developer might open a new estate and pay for the roads and the electricity wires and the sewerage pipes, but for every person on the suburban fringe we need that bit of extra lane on the highways and bridges, that bit of extra sewerage tunnel under the Yarra Yarra River, that bit of additional burner in the electricity generator – to say nothing of how the quality of life is diminished every time our phones drop out, or we go into traffic gridlock, or pay extortionate parking fees in the city or at the airport. The developers and the others do not pay for that, and suffer for that  – we do!

There comes a point when overpopulation destroys the planet, impacts badly on the ordinary taxpayer, and contributes to the general stress and unhappiness of all.
—
*The Corporal Works of Mercy
To feed the hungry
To give drink to the thirsty.
To clothe the naked.
To visit the prisoner.
To shelter the homeless.
To attend to the sick.
To bury the dead.

The public appearances of these two, so far as i can judge, have been “managed”. Fear of the media, ever hungry for the headline or the controversy, ensures that the “minders” make sure no one asks the wrong questions.

As someone who has had extraordinary difficulty contacting Bill Shorten, getting past his insensitive human shock absorbers, I want to know the answer to the Hilary Clinton question – (As a Life Member of the Australian Labor Party), “what access do I have?”

In a letter, I reminded Bill Shorten that my grandfather, William Carruthers Davidson, had access to Ben Chifley, then Prime Minster of Australia and his local Member of Parliament, when, one day a month, Chifley made himself available to his constituents. He would advertise in the local Katoomba paper (Blue Mountains of NSW) that he would be at Gearins Hotel for the day. Now them were the days.

PS added on December 5

Date: 5 December 2013 3:50:41 am AEDT

To: noah.carroll@vic.alp.org.au

Cc: george.wright@cbr.alp.org.au

Dear Noah and George

Would you please convey to the National Executive and anyone else involved that we, as members, are very disheartened by factional deals which leave ordinary members out of the process.

When I was young, groups of members rose up against this type of thing and stood as “independent Labor Candidates” because the power brokers chose mates – the worst candidates.

I object to Feeney parachuting in. I object to the parachute process in Moreland/Coburg. I just want a say, as a Member, that we started to gain heart when we voted on a choice of leader even if, in the end, well organised factionalism won out. But at least Shorten had to work hard for it. (The question still is – was he the best choice? Does he stand out as someone we are proud to have as leader? )

But to be handed a safe seat on a plate – like Hotham ???

A pox on all those who put their own power grabs before the party.

I want a vote please.

—

Dally Messenger

LIFE MEMBER OF THE AUSTRALIAN LABOR PARTY

Civil Marriage Celebrants.

Today I wrote to George Brandis. I told him to wise up.

I told him that 1600 celebrants served the country really well (and they did).

I told him that 2500 should be the absolute max.

I told him he had between 10,000 and 12,000 on his hands.

I told him it was hard to conceive of a more mismanaged government program.

I asked him to please take an interest in his job .