In reverse order
Shame on You–Get Lost
Week ending 29 October 2001
A few days ago something deeply disturbing happened to me as I picked my way through the forest of life.
A complete stranger mistook me for being alive. It wasn't so much a touching experience — more a complete shock to my system. That night I went to bed and had a nightmare that I was having a nightmare. I awoke in the nightmare to find myself in the middle of a nightmare about myself being awake in the middle of a nightmare about a nightmare. The stranger wasn't even in it.
It made me think about the time I lived in London and slept with a pickaxe handle beneath my bed. I was "alive" then. By mistaking me for being alive, the stranger was implying that, somehow, I was like I was then. I wasn't sure I wanted to be there.
Being alive implies a few things, none of them particularly wholesome. There's muddy fields, unwashed socks, threadbare gloves, dog shit on your shoes, you name 'em — you'll find all of the unsavoury things only occur when you are alive.
Hermit Empeysex : from April 20
Any sane soul will know that this world is a wholly insane place – a lunatic asylum hurtling through space, corrupted by the omnipresence of televised commercial greed.
It is a cruel and vicious place that we have ourselves created, although we turn our backs on the problems we continue to compound. So what can anyone do about it? What can we do about it?
The world is a place where every living creature is quite simply out to get what it, she or he can and those people who refuse to see the truth in that are not being honest with themselves. How we interpret and pursue our desires is the all important factor.
Perhaps something we can do is to constantly remind ourselves of the question, what are we really here for?
If we accept that we are each here for what we can get, where does that leave us? Where does it leave us in relation to our children?
For many of us busy living within the lives into which we are born, our concentration on such questions is merely perfunctory. Meaningful answers to the questions can only come from within and we each must determine and evaluate our own perceptions of what we find.
Yet our perceptions can be clouded by the very realities we have come to accept. “Still the man hears what he want to hear and disregards the rest ...”
Focusing on the question of our meaning might not provide the answers we might expect.
Not focusing on the question achieves nothing at all.
archived on July 29, 2001
Some would say that I am a man of a "colourful background".
Whatever, I can emphatically declare that I hold no shame for my any of it. It is who I am and what I am and I have done all that I have done for one reason and one reason alone and that is to survive.
There may be some things of which I am not proud and by that I mean I hold a certain degree of regret concerning them. Like the time in my early 20s when I lived for a short while in my Austin Mini with my girlfriend, our worldly possessions and our newly acquired kitten. It had been a mistake to take along the kitten, as I found one morning on awakening.
It might seem impossible. There isn't much space in an Austin Mini, as anyone who has been in one will know. We had driven away from London at the start of the 1970s to find a new home and life in the country and it was our second night sleeping out in the car. We achieved that by distributing our possessions and bags evenly in the front and rear seats and then unrolling the three-quarter mattress we had somehow crammed into the already full car and laying it across the filled seats. There was just room beneath the roof of the car to crawl onto the mattress and stretch out.
We'd parked up in an old quarry I thought was deserted in the lee of The Wrekin, an extinct volcano in Shropshire, the county of my birth. Before we'd located the quarry, we'd driven up another wooded dirt track to an open space where we sat outside the car for a while enjoying the late summer evening, gazing at the dark bulk of The Wrekin, which I'd climbed many times and thoroughly explored in my youth.
Someone was flashing torches in Morse code from the side and from the top of the mountain, though my knowledge was not good enough to decode the signals. I dug out my own torch and began flashing back. I knew only a few letters, but I did know the SOS sequence, . . . – – – . . . , and sent that a few times. I couldn't be sure, but it seemed as if whoever was up there in the night noticed our light and began flashing something in response, waiting for my signal before starting again. After a while and unable to decipher any of the messages, I grew bored and put the torch away.
Then we decided the place we were in wasn't really suitable for staying the night and set off back down the dirt track to look for another spot. The track widened considerably just before it reached the country lane leading to the The Wrekin and, as we approached the road, we were startled by a jeep containing uniformed soldiers which pulled from the lane onto the dirt track and headed on past us. A few moments later, several heavy army trucks followed after the jeep. Perhaps they'd been on a night exercise and mistook our light for something to do with whatever reason they were there. We never found out. Sorry guys.
So we ended up in the quarry at the top of another lane leading into the woods.
Getting up in the morning was a precise manoeuvre which required slithering down the mattress to lower oneself feet first into the driver or front passenger footwell. I had fed the kitten the previous evening, leaving it some food and milk in the driver's footwell and, remembering where they were, was being careful to keep my bare feet towards the pedals so as not to land on them. Instead my feet landed in something else — a pile of cat muck where the unfortunate kitten had relieved itself and which squeezed and oozed itself up between my toes.
It was too much to bear and finding the kitten I opened the car window and lobbed it out, only to my disgust to see it fall into a thick clump of bramble and gorse, where it began letting out a pitiful wailing.
I was instantly remorseful but refrained from getting out of the car until my companion asked: "You're not just going to leave it there, are you?". By the time I'd recovered it from the thick bracken I looked as if I'd been in a war.
Then we heard a shout and discovered the quarry was not abandoned. Several workmen appeared from a wooden hut and, beckoning us over, invited us in where after hearing our brief tale they treated us to steaming hot cups of tea and some bacon and eggs. Then we all shook hands and I set off on my adventures again with my friend.
Later that day we found a cardboard box which, together with a saucer of milk, a note and some tins of food and an old pullover, we left with the kitten inside in a town telephone kiosk, which we observed from our parked car until a woman who used the telephone found it and carried it out.
As I said, some things I regret and the kitten was one.
Then there are the things that some people would have me feeling guilt and shame over and to them I say quite simply, get lost. Like the time I was in a Birmingham Winston Green prison cell overlooking the secure exercise yard where the remanded Birmingham bombers would exercise during their detention, accused of planting an IRA bomb in a Birmingham pub.
You might think Papillon had a yarn. You should hear mine, only I would need a dozen or more ghost-writers to help put it to paper.
Peace
Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
WB Yeats
Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder what you are!
Up above the world so high,
Like a diamond in the sky!
Jane TaylorMaybe I'm getting lazy in my dotage. Seems though that it gets harder these days to tell the difference between who really is on the ball and who is merely on the political bandwagon.
Being on the bandwagon has one particularly serious disadvantage in that the only goals that get scored are in the back of your own net from your own team players.
I don't know if you have ever met a little Hitler. I hope you never do, but my guess is that you will, sometime or other.
They take great glee in stabbing people in the back, passing on malicious comment when the people they are putting down are nowhere in sight. They consider themselves right above all else and no one in their tiny world has any right to any other opinion. Oh, they might listen, but their patronising condescension is far more visible than any other element in their make-up, apart from their sheer ignorance. These are the little Hitlers in life.
There are times when love seems not just too far beyond reach, but knowingly too far to the observer. This is the time when, more than ever, you have to be aware of taking the starring role in the movie of your life.
Yet where does life take us when the time comes for us to move on? We cling to our beliefs of an afterlife, though for all of us any real glimpse of reality behind our belief is unattainable except for, mostly, immaterial clues.
I have seen ghosts, on more than one occasion. Why they revealed themselves to me as they did I do not know. The visions, however, left me utterly convinced of the existence of a separate reality. Yet it remains incomprehensibly difficult to equate death itself with life of another plane, regardless of the many disciplines and religions that focus on the preparation of the soul and the consciousness for the eventual and inevitable transition from life on earth to what we term ‘death’.
We are of course all stars from the moment of conception, though we may not be rationally aware of it. Think of the potential if you knew that the camera was on you all the time.
Don’t go and get conceited now. Stars have to take on every conceivable role, from lead to extra, producer to director, make-up artist to tea-boy. That’s what makes the star.
There you are, sitting in some café somewhere staring at nothing in particular and wondering what the hell it’s all about and just why you bother anyway. One lump or two, Horatio?
Switch on the camera. It’s there with you everywhere you go, you just have to turn it on, like. Not playing up to the camera takes some getting used to at first, but persist and you’ll soon learn the knack.
It’s a little like trust. Regardless of words, someone who breaches your trust becomes a hard person to be a true friend to. Broken trust can never be restored, only repaired and, like the glue marks, doubts always remain. Genuine trust is something that must be established and maintained from the very start.
More important, the motive to engender trust must be fully present to begin. Diligent awareness of the camera will make all of these things quite clear. It might not be simple, though.
To begin, you have to learn how to get your lines right. And while you’re reciting them, you also have to adopt the role of cameraman, clapperboy, sound technician and director ... you get my gist? Ah, it’s a tough life, I hear you say.
If you forget that the impact of everything you do resounds for all eternity whether you’d like it to or not, if for a moment you forget that, then turn on the camera.
In fact it’s a good idea to get into the habit of remembering to turn the camera on all the time until you get to the point where you no longer have to remember to turn it on, but instead have to remember to ask yourself if you wish to turn it off.
You probably won’t want to turn it off as it is a little like breathing. Once you begin, it makes more sense to continue, right?
There are however, as with everything, exceptions.
Life just wouldn’t be life without them, would it?
When you discover what life is all about
Is when you wake up lonely.Being gentle is to acknowledge the spirit of humility. None of the women I have so far met knew how to handle or deal with someone like me on a long term basis. To be blunt, they just didn't have a clue. That might sound unkind. It isn't—it's just a fact.
In the ideal world, for instance, everything would be free. Imagine it—free telephones, free everything. Those who argue against this simply do not have the best interests of mankind at heart, no matter what you say.
Having on more than one occasion lost more than most ever have, I am left with a certain perspective on things. All of us live within the trappings of our own personal experience. Do you control your life ... or does your life control you?
Somehow these days my life seems to have become something of a doormat to the troubles, wants and needs of others who don't really give much of a damn about my own. Not all of them, but some. The situation is a little untenable but is one in which I seem to have been put and escape, given my present means, seems impossible. Given the kind of life I have led over the years, that situation can seem doubly untenable, and a little beyond belief.
I remember when I was 14 and sleeping in a hayrack in a field in Wales after having ridden through the night for several hours on a motor scooter I'd 'borrowed'. The hayrack stood alone deep in a wide open field by the roadside and I camouflaged the scooter with straw before building a deep hollow at the top of the rack and turning in. Earlier I'd pulled into a roadside barn some miles back but after climbing up onto the stored hay bales and getting out a packet of biscuits for a snack, I was disturbed by a pack of rats crazed by the scent of food. Already weary, I crawled out of the barn and continued on my way. Just when I was prepared to sleep at the side of the road, I came upon the field with the hayrack. After gallivanting about the countryside for a few days on the scooter, I finally took it back to close to where I'd borrowed it from, none the worse for wear and with a full tank of fuel. My thoughts were relatively simple during those days.
One year later I was living in and driving around the country in a black Rover 90 — something of a limousine in those days—when I stopped for a young girl who was hitching a ride on the edge of a country market town. She was going home from her job at the bank and lived in a village about 15 miles away. I wasn't planning on going that way but said I would as I had nothing else to do, as you do if you're in your right mind. The girl didn't look much older than a schoolgirl, but then I wasn't the world's oldest man myself.
By the time we'd reached her home she'd already told me she was going to ask her mother f I could stay at their home. She did, her mother agreed, and one of her three sisters moved into a bedroom occupied by herself and another sister so that I could sleep in her single room. I was fed and watered and told to stay as long as I liked. I was nervous about staying, but did, and enjoyed it, though I never slept with any of the girls or saw any of them even half undressed. Odd.
I'd take the younger sister to her job at the bank each morning and be there to collect her each afternoon, though she told me I didn't 'have to'. One morning on our way to her place of work, I spotted a motorcycle cop behind me in the country lane and kept a wary eye on him in the mirror. I had tax on the vehicle, but I had no insurance, not even a driver's licence. Then the unthinkable happened and the cop pulled alongside and signalled me to pull in. Mind racing, I pulled to a stop.
The cop got off his bike and walked toward the car as I wound the window down.
"God morning," he said, peering in at the girl and me. "Your car?"
I said it was and he walked slowly around it, coming back to my window. "Where are you going?"
"Town," I said. He nodded at the girl and asked: "This the wife then?" It was getting ludicrous. I didn't know what to make of it. Maybe he didn't either.
"No, just a friend I'm taking in to work," I said.
"I stopped you to tell you that the side strip over your back wheel has come away and is flapping about. You wouldn't want it catching someone at the side of the road now," said the cop.
I got out to look. He was right. I wrenched the thin metal strip away from the body and dropped it into the trunk. The cop pulled his leather gloves back on.
"Drive carefully sir," he said, walking back to his bike and riding off ahead of us.
I left the girl's house after being hijacked in the country and getting badly beaten and put in hospital. I never saw the car again and because of my being an illegal driver, couldn't really pursue it.
Some years later I was approaching Westminster Bridge in London in a soft top Lotus Elan with my girlfriend when we ran into a major traffic jam. Then we began noticing armed soldiers and police and spotted the road block up ahead. Through the radio we learned that there had been a terrorist threat to the Houses of Parliament and I watched as each car was thoroughly searched. It was a depressing predicament. I had a large lump of hashish I was taking on a visit to a musician friend up near Oldham and didn't want to have to ditch it. I was also lacking insurance and a driving licence, not to mention being in a borrowed car I'd been driving for some six months on false plates. If I tried to pull out and turn back I knew that the motorcycle cops would come after me. There were a good many, just sitting astride their bikes at various points.
Desperation sometimes pulls bountiful tricks. I ordered my girlfriend to do exactly what I said without arguing and got her to shove a cushion from the back of the car up her clothes. "You're pregnant and I'm taking you to the hospital," I told her and pulled out of the queue, leaning on the horn and flashing as many lights as I could as I drove up to the road block.
My actions had started a small panic among the cops and soldiers and then I was looking at a soldier with a submachine gun. "My girlfriend's pregnant, we're heading for St Thomas' Hospital" I called at him. He looked in and seemed to panic, then hurried away to speak to someone at the barrier. A moment later a senior looking officer came over and looking alarmed said he had arranged for two motorcycle outriders to escort us through the traffic to the hospital. They took us right to the hospital entrance, then waved goodbye.
They say women require money. Well, I had money, and I had women. I pretty much knew how to treat them both too. Now I don't have either. So much for better or for worse and you don't have to take any church vow to be faithful.
Anyway, I have to stop here, otherwise I overrun my allotted space and the editor gets cranky. Talk to you later.
LIFE THE DELIVERER — DEATH THE DELIVERANCE
Why are we dying to live
when we're just living to die...
Johnny & Edgar Winter — from the White Trash albumHey, wanna have sex baby? Wanna make love? Now there's two vastly differing dimensions of thought. Or are they?
Life itself could be regarded as the constant unification of such 'opposites', from before the Big Bang through to after. Here we are as individuals, widely differing in our ways yet all with one ultimate common thread. We are all living to die.
We all start out young on the trail and youth is not just innocence, it is also ignorance. Depending on the background, that ignorance can also be arrogant.
Confronting the reality of that can be a big eye opener. It puts life in perspective. As to death itself, no living person can know what it means. It is simply an exit from the dimension in which we 'live'. Our 'knowledge' is nothing more than our own conceptions built upon the accumulation of that knowledge and coloured by our individual prejudices.
We mourn the loss of the company of someone who passes from this world. We might also mourn their loss of life. But should we? we know that death is eventually inevitable. In life we are restricted by the limitations of life itself. Death releases us from those chains and so freed perhaps, just perhaps, we can then be anywhere.
The presence of death always reminds us of how little we know about it. Many simply refuse to face up to its reality. Others embrace it if not with open arms then at least with open mind. It is after all where we are going and there is nothing we can do that will change that.
Some things in life simply defy comprehension. Like the canary that went everywhere with its master and never left his shoulder except to flutter about his head before re-alighting on his shoulder.
Death is really life's big secret. No matter what we do to unravel its mystery, we can only ever discover the truth by going there. Life is, in essence, the process of not only living but also of preparing ourselves for the unknown.
If you are finding this morbid you are wrongly reading it from the perspective of your own loneliness in contemplating death.
Where do you look when you have lost all hope? Is it possible to lose all hope? Until you have lost that place in which you feel comfortable, you cannot really comprehend what it means to lose hope.
They say that hope springs eternal. Perhaps it does. But springs run dry. We have built our own expectations of this world into our lives and those expectations continue to dominate us, even though we may find argument with them.
We live on those narrow expectations—we feel safe with them, unthreatened. We have written the rules and allowed those rules to control us. Perhaps the human condition is one of insanity. Certainly when looked at in the light of cold reason and logic, the human condition is illogical.
For many years I lived in fear of being taken seriously. I'd been ridiculed so often I began to believe and take it for granted that I was actually ridiculous. I took to finding comfort in my cat, who would simply sit on my lap and purr in contentment whenever I talked to him. He displayed a loyalty almost impossible to find in my fellow human beings. Perhaps that's why the Egyptians idolised cats. I don't know about the Nantuk indians though—they ate them.
Have you ever wondered why the US natives were called 'Indians'? I'll get on to that one next issue.
from 10 September 2002:
Living and working with and for each other
"Don't put your hands in the fire — it burns," my father told me when I was less than two years old.
I had no memory of being burned at that stage. What did it mean? I could only reason from my father's tones that it probably wasn't something very nice.
I found out a short time later, when I was following the budgerigar around the room and tripped near the fireplace. My hand, outstretched to break my fall, landed on the glowing fire coals. It was one of the very few tiimes that the safety guard was not in front of the fireplace. I then knew what it meant to be 'burned'.
There are two morals to this story and the first one concerns assumptions and predisposition. We often consider we 'know' when what we really mean is that we assume.
We live separate lives but often tend to forget that and somehow expect others to be like we are. We consider that we 'know' others, but again what we mean is we assume certain things. Not always, but often.
Living and working with and for each other requires a certain definition of purpose and understanding. Our commercialised world has drawn us into a point of view that others are somehow there to help us move up the ladder of materialism or career. It is a generally accepted perspective but it is one that is essentially flawed as it is negatively dismissive.
By that I mean we reject those individuals who do not posses the certain qualities we consider as necessary to our own 'cause'. Unless we are prepared to look deeper and beyond our self-imposed requirements, we self-impose our own limitations on our own true development as full human beings.
The other moral to the story concerns Gopher's Law. Although chance is infinite, it is uncanny how often a gopher emerging from a hole in the ground is spotted by a predator, despite the gopher having a choice of many exits. That is the basis to Gopher's Law.
Gopher's Law centres on the natural flow of things. We can strive to be fully aware of all natural ebb and flow, from the inconceivable to the mundane. It can become an all-consuming requirement.
Or we can simply go with the ebb and flow, letting it take us to where we might sometimes get blindly caught out by harmful events—events we might have avoided had we continued exercising vigilance against the chances of ebb and flow. Kind of a Catch 22 situation in a One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest scenario.
The fatality of life is a comic cosmic responsibility upon all of us. When our time comes to go, it simply comes and there might not be much we can do about it. For the individual leaving this world, little matters any more. But that passing away can place a burden upon those left behind if the manner of passing was something that may have somehow been avoided. Like the missing fireplace guard, Gopher's Law again.
Yet how can we possibly keep ourselves aware of the infinite possibilities of this life? You could opt for the Miracle Cure offered by Newsmedianews, though it is doubtful if it will significantly impact upon chance reduction.
Alternatively, if you have your own identified means of dealing with this astonishingly complex life equation, do mail it to me so that I may publish your perceptions to the benefit of others.
Troubling events in the world are at the forefront of awareness on a wide scale right now, making this the perfect opportunity to examine the major importance of paying proper heed to motive.
Directing anger against those whose actions would harm us may or may not provide a short term answer, depending on the manner in which that anger is translated. Displaying, and acting on such anger may also be understandable if not condoned, but it should not be encouraged at the cost of ignoring the motive.
In the long term however it will do little to prevent recurrence of similar events. All human action is derived from motive, be it the seeking of a wife or husband, a better job, the quest for knowledge. So too are acts of insanity, premeditated violence and hostility based likewise upon motive.
We have developed our social mores to seek out and punish those who transgress accepted lawful behaviour and, at present and regardless of the work done elsewhere to broaden deterrence or in developing attempts to tackle causative factors, the focus is primarily on punishment and not on prevention.
Fitting intruder alarms, or building bigger and better equipped military resources, is a preventative measure based on deterrence and not on tackling motives head on.
Failing to acknowledge reasons and motives behind unlawful or antisocial behaviour because it is more convenient to our own motives to do so is to fail to help rid ourselves of the very problem we identify.
Until honest evaluation of the reasons behind unlawful or antisocial behaviour is made into a priority for preventing recurrences, the same problems will continue.
The Assuaging Charity
‘We give a dollar when we pass and hope our eyes don’t meet’
—Mary Chapin Carpenter, Stones In The RoadIt is a fact that having very few material assets today gets you marked down as a nobody, a ‘worthless’ person.
Despite the richness of a person’s spirit, the eyes of the material ghouls see only their false idols. Pop a pill and paint the world the colour of your choice but don't expect others not to ignore your colour blindness.
Our modern world is filled with new, astonishing things. Some are very practical, others less so. The developments of mankind are a wonder to behold. A pity then that mankind is not itself likewise.
In the main people are a selfishly backstabbing lot covered in veneers of self imposed make believe disguises.
If, having absorbed that, your reaction is one of anger or hurt, then you probably haven’t thought about it that much. You have taken it personally and it has touched your subjective understanding.
The anger or the hurt arises because you are not really sure if the phrase ‘In the main people are a selfishly backstabbing lot etc.’ applies to you or not. And that, good reader, is because you haven't thought about it that much.
There is a way of life that those living in what is dubbed the free world call freedom.
I make no excuses for putting this illusion under the spotlight and explaining just why that ‘freedom’ is nothing more than an illusion perpetrated by those with vested interests, and subsequently believed by those whose lives are controlled by those vested interests.
Freedom itself might be a difficult concept to define in terms, but most definitions call upon the concept of liberty as a definitive framework:
liberty : noun freedom from constraint, captivity, slavery or tyranny; freedom to do as one pleases; the unrestrained enjoyment of natural rights; power of free choice; privilege; permission; free range; leisure; disposal; the bounds within which certain privileges are enjoyed; (often in plural) a limited area outside a prison in which prisoners were allowed to live (archaic); presumptuous, improper or undue freedom of speech or action; speech or action violating ordinary civility.
Freedom may be measured against the reactions raised when it is disputed. In reality, little freedom exists in the developed world.
Rocking the status quo is never a comfortable action to undertake when you sail in the very same vessel. It can put you at loggerheads with those who are blind to the status quo and who have thus blindly and somewhat unquestionably accepted it. Such blind acceptance might seem trivial but it causes far more conflict than any other state of mind. It is a state of mind that can only be improved by a process of unlearning the indoctrination of the years.
Freedom within a social environment is in the main evaluated, by the individual, on subjective criteria with the results mistakenly viewed as objective. The subjective criteria are in turn tied to personal loss and gain. Is it any wonder then that such a state of mind leads more often than not to conflict?
A true evaluation of freedom is impossible in modern society. There are simply too many different levels of loss and gain in such a material way of life. Only by discarding the utilities acquired by living in a social world indispensably tied to materialism can any meaningful grasp of the deeper reality of freedom ever be touched on.
Oh - and freedom itself? Haha.
An Ordinary Jack archived on March 9, 2004
No matter how you cut it there’s a lot of ordinary Jacks about. You don’t have much choice about it, no matter who you are born to nor what gender you may be. And when you strip away the veneer, well, we’re all just Ordinary Jacks underneath.
When I was a kid in the 50’s days of black and white only TV, the word Quatermass became synonymous in my mind with a curiousity driven, fear tinged fascination of the unknown and what other realm life forms might possibly lurk in dimly lit excavated holes in the ground. For those who don’t know, Quatermass and The Pit was a UK sci-fi series long before the advent of programs such as Doctor Who. It captured a perfect blend of shadowy eeriness within my young mind.
The drama was maintained week by week, probably because no-one ever saw quite what was or may have been in the pit but everybody seemed caught up through each episode with saving civilisation from something or other. Whoever came up with the absolutely brilliant name of Quatermass should have gained the Order of the Garter at the very least.
What is worth noting and keeping to mind is that there are those people who will stop almost at nothing to make you believe that there is something wrong with you. It is not that there is something wrong with you—it just suits them to have someone to browbeat and to feel superior to and the impact of their behaviour upon their targets is of little or no concern to them. Beware of such people, for they are the Ordinary Jacks who consider themselves a cut above everybody else.
(...still being compiled on line...)
THE WAR AGAINST TERRORISM & THE UNKNOWN FACTOR
To ask if we might have lost the war against terrorism is to leap into the deep waters of highly sensitive matters.
In the event of unavoidable battle, a wise combatant should always seek to honestly determine just who might be winning or have the upper hand at any given stage.
Doing so provides the option of changing tactics—something that can prove vital to survival itself.
The war against evil is part of the business of life. Evil knows no bounds and stops at nothing but it can be halted by a greater force. Whether it can be eradicated would seem to be a hugely difficult question to answer.
It would be foolish to accept the belief that terrorism can be eradicated. This leaves the believer highly vulnerable from a false of security.
The world is caught up in a war against terrorism and terrorists but the exact status of that war is not quantifiable because we know that there are the unknown terrorists. Names can only be crossed off a known list. As to the rest, you can only be aware of their unknown state.
The war against terrorism has been ongoing for a very long time. It has come to the front of public awareness so very much more since 11 September and the events subsequent to then.
Our world has greatly changed as a result. Aside from the continuing military action, terrorist atrocities and the sweeping changes to internal security that has affected almost all aspects of daily life, the events of the last few years have also wreaked sweeping changes in individual attitudes.
It is necessary to look at and try to identify such changes within ourselves, for the collective individual attitude forms the bedrock to the structure, the development and the behaviour of any society.
The events and subsequent events of 11 September have impacted on several important aspects of most individual lives. Perhaps most noticeably they have impacted on our ability to trust and they have impacted on our individual levels of tolerance—two vitally important elements of social interaction that determine how we respond to others.
The importance of such change should not be overlooked and would be perilous to dismiss.
We are all caught up in the ongoing events of the world whether we care to admit, to acknowledge or even to like it. We are all being swept along by those events, whether we care to admit, to acknowledge or even to like that as well. That is precisely why we should pay attention to the importance of the changes to individual attitude as a result of world events.
We might not be able to change the fact that we are being swept along by events. That would be as difficult as preventing any ripples from a stone falling into water. What we can change, and control to some extent, is the impact this may have on each of us as individuals and how it may affect our own behaviour.
To exercise any such control and change, we need firstly to be aware of the effects that the events of the world are having on our individual attitudes.
No-one can deny that levels of fear have grown throughout the world since 11 September. That growth of fear has become a much more powerful negative force able to act on and erode our ability and willingness to trust.
It is not just for those within the military and defence forces and governments to hold firm against the much expanded threats to world peace and safety by modern terrorists. The ability to acquire deadly weapons makes the modern terrorist a much greater global threat.
Add the element of terrorist fanaticism and the dangers become glaringly obvious.
In a newspaper article looking at recent changes to security in the UK in the wake of the Istanbul bombing, the Sun's political editor Trevor Kavanagh wrote: "…the fanaticism that fuels Bin Laden will not be ended by any concession the West could offer.
"It is in this context that we must judge the threat to the West.
"This is not a war in which we can seek terms. It is them - or it is us."
That would seem a point wholly missed by the likes of those who staged the Trafalgar Square protests against President Bush. It might be said that those who organised and those who participated in the protest were being blindly swept along by the force of events without being aware of the changes those events might have had on their individual attitudes.
In a letter published elsewhere, one UK writer called the protesters 'apologists for terrorrism'.
THE
MOVIE OF YOUR LIFE 
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