Always when I set aside time to write my blog, it is a bit of bother to find a way to start. And then when pen hits paper (so to speak) all the half-hidden concepts come out babbling like the crowd out of the stadium underpass after a great rock show.
The noise and excitement, the colours and chaos all get carried along the same intangible undercurrent of goodwill and shared experience.
And I am required somehow, to route this tide of ideas into streams and rivulets, until it has ebbed to a reasonably clear and logical train of thought.
All the words that are vying for the top spot in today’s blog, are provoked by a statement from a well-known person in the last week or so. I will not say who that person is, but I do think it is a sentiment shared by many. And it is disappointing.
They only complain about the corruption, because they are not also eating.
AN Onymous
Yes, of course. Is it not palpable? The unfairness of taking out of the benefit for many, to advance the interest of just a few?
To avoid any inconsequential analysis of abstract deliberations. Let me make it clear. Fishrot. Diamondrot. And the next rot that has already festered away at our collective ability to look after all of us.
If the money that was unfairly allocated to “The Six”, or nine, or however few it did benefit.
Who knows how much was actually involved? According to corruptionwatch.org.za it was around US$650m. US$. At today’s (poor) rate, that is N$9,750,000,000.
Could that have helped educate a few of the children included in our population of 2,5m? Or build a fairly robust structure in which they could go to school? Who could them empower themselves to feed their families? Or maybe buy a few doses of vaccine? Or invest in exportable renewable energy for some valuable foreign exchange, rather than allowing foreign oil guzzling countries to ransack our pristine countryside in the search for oil, which anyway needs to stop if we have any hope of surviving climate change?
Yes, anonymous person. I am complaining because I am not eating. I am not eating the fruit from a food secure sovereign state. But let me know if you need any home remedies for your indigestion.
The purpose of this blog as a whole, resolves around living off the land. But to live off the land, you must also live in the land.
Who was it that said, no man is an island?
No Man Is an Island is a 1962 war film about the exploits of George Ray Tweed, a United States Navy radioman who avoided capture and execution by the Japanese during their years-long World War II occupation of Guam.
And because this post is not so pretty, there are no pretty pictures to add. So, let me include the poster for the movie, as a tension breaker.
The actual idiom is much more intuitive than I had thought until I had found this on the web.
This expression is a quotation from John Donne’s Devotions (1624):
“No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main.”
https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/no+man+is+an+island
That says it all, I hope you were able to glide along the gist of my torrent of thought and arrived at the same tranquil loch of logic. No man is an island. You are your fellow man; your fellow man is you. Do not take from your fellow man, what you do not want taken from you. Help your fellow man, to help you.
Such very true words – and a motto we all should follow- you are your neighbour anf your neighbour is you- help each other in any way you can !