I wish I could say that the news of the weekend had not engendered a sense of relief … mostly in the sense that since early September I have had a horrible feeling of incipient disaster, and now the ‘other shoe’ has dropped. Squashing innocents like cockroaches and with wicked intention to hurt more than just people.

There are many threads to the mean-spiritedness that the perpetrators have entangled in this wyrd. The one that most affects us ordinary humans, and even more so for us Australians, is that our sense of security has been severely dented by the attacks last year in the USA and this last weekend in Bali, Indonesia. We have delighted in the illusion that we live in a safe world; that only ‘ordinary criminality’ (like burglary or rape) and ‘ordinary disasters’ (like car crashes) are likely to be the most offence that we might have to confront. But the scale of these assaults is so great that we cannot comprehend the need by someone to do these things!

There will, no doubt, be some brainless folk who take it upon themselves to take the proverbial eye-for-an-eye upon innocent Australians who just happen to be of the Islamic faith … what does that prove - that they are just as lacking in dealing with their anger as the individuals who commit these huge murders? Because murderers they are!

There is another thread here too, of a nation just to our north, with problems of race, economics, politics and religion. By attacking one of the few profitable economic zones of Indonesia, and one of its most consistent industries, these murderers have directly threatened the possibility that might grow through respecting others and working together.
It’s almost as if they have no joi de vivre, and no ability to tolerate it in others either.

To top it all there is a distinct flavour of opportunistic war propagandising that carefully avoids looking at any possible reason for these murderers, who present as well-informed and critical thinking individuals, to act in such a way against such a large group of people, i.e. those who live in the Western culture of Australia, America, UK, Canada, Europe and New Zealand etc.

I wish I knew what to do to make in-roads into the apparent small-mindedness of the people who cannot tolerate folk being different. It hurts somewhere inside that so much hate is directed so amorphously at the culture I live in.
I want to know why … why do you hate me? What have _I_ done to you and yours that you hate me and mine so? Is it that because I believe differently to these people, they are afraid that their faith may be shattered just because I do not believe as they do? How powerful I, a total unknown, might be!

I don’t know what to do, except make the effort to go to the Red Cross Blood Bank this weekend to provide some support for those now transferred to hospitals here in Australia, and scout out some spare sheets and other things to be donated at work towards the Balinese hospitals.

Gods help us all! I try not to think too hard how these murderers and their ilk would like to drag us all back into their version of the dark ages.