I was pondering the unfairness of having to pay a man £340 to tile my bathroom which is the size of a telephone box. This chap is on £150 a day and a friend tells me this is an entirely reasonable wage for a man to expect, even though he left school early and went straight to work on a building site. He has not done my tiling particularly well, and he has left me with a huge amount of cleaning up to do.
I was thinking over my long-standing and deeply felt dislike of feminism; deeply felt because I feel that the initial ideals of equality have all gone horribly wrong and turned women into men instead of making us all people of honour, dignity and fairness. However, I was having to question my position on the basis of the equal pay argument because I don't know any women earning £150 a day.
Whilst mulling over this, I get a call from my mother. During a period when she was homeless, she took a job as a nanny to a 7 month old baby boy who lived on a small moorland estate, and raised him through his infancy. I remember him making his first wobbly steps, playing in the garden, on the beach, a chubby innocent in a world of carefree play.
Now, he is in Afghanistan; a serving Army officer. My mother has telephoned to tell me that he has killed his first man, a Taliban fighter. On almost the same day a young man in her village was involved in a car accident and paramedics spent two hours on the roadside trying to stabilize him before he could be moved to the hospital. He died.
The anomaly is disgusting. I remember hearing how our young friend was first smeared with blood from a dead fox, how he learned to paunch rabbits; my mother clucking with disapproval. Now he has been trained to see the enemy as a target, to aim and shoot without visualizing that his target has parents, brothers and sisters, perhaps a wife and children of his own, or he couldn’t pull the trigger.
Exposed from the waist up in his armoured tank, striking the familiar pose of a young, privileged buck out in the back of a Land Rover hunting for birds, deer, or rabbits on his home territory, this young man is vulnerable for the first time. Kill or be killed.
Conversely, the paramedics are trained to see all life as sacrosanct; to spare no effort in preserving a life, however tenuous the hold, however worthless the individual. It’s simplistic of me I know, but today I have an overwhelming desire that ALL young men the world over be trained as paramedics and not soldiers, for their own peace, and for world peace.
The value we place on things is entirely arbitrary. God help us and God help my young friend to live with himself. But, as long as there are wars - which looks like forever - decent boys will have a lot of cleaning up to do.
I was thinking over my long-standing and deeply felt dislike of feminism; deeply felt because I feel that the initial ideals of equality have all gone horribly wrong and turned women into men instead of making us all people of honour, dignity and fairness. However, I was having to question my position on the basis of the equal pay argument because I don't know any women earning £150 a day.
Whilst mulling over this, I get a call from my mother. During a period when she was homeless, she took a job as a nanny to a 7 month old baby boy who lived on a small moorland estate, and raised him through his infancy. I remember him making his first wobbly steps, playing in the garden, on the beach, a chubby innocent in a world of carefree play.
Now, he is in Afghanistan; a serving Army officer. My mother has telephoned to tell me that he has killed his first man, a Taliban fighter. On almost the same day a young man in her village was involved in a car accident and paramedics spent two hours on the roadside trying to stabilize him before he could be moved to the hospital. He died.
The anomaly is disgusting. I remember hearing how our young friend was first smeared with blood from a dead fox, how he learned to paunch rabbits; my mother clucking with disapproval. Now he has been trained to see the enemy as a target, to aim and shoot without visualizing that his target has parents, brothers and sisters, perhaps a wife and children of his own, or he couldn’t pull the trigger.
Exposed from the waist up in his armoured tank, striking the familiar pose of a young, privileged buck out in the back of a Land Rover hunting for birds, deer, or rabbits on his home territory, this young man is vulnerable for the first time. Kill or be killed.
Conversely, the paramedics are trained to see all life as sacrosanct; to spare no effort in preserving a life, however tenuous the hold, however worthless the individual. It’s simplistic of me I know, but today I have an overwhelming desire that ALL young men the world over be trained as paramedics and not soldiers, for their own peace, and for world peace.
The value we place on things is entirely arbitrary. God help us and God help my young friend to live with himself. But, as long as there are wars - which looks like forever - decent boys will have a lot of cleaning up to do.
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