Categories: uncategorized
Date: 04 September 2008 14:17:11
I've just noticed that in precisely seven days' time it will be my first blogiversary. How to celebrate? Would a cake be justified? (I have many ways of justifying a cake...).
Of course Sept 11th is not the greatest day for any kind of festivity. I missed the first impact of 9/11 because I was in hospital waiting for my blood pressure to go down, so that I could have lymph nodes removed (it was found to be at a level that caused an Irish nurse to exclaim 'Oh my God! Oh Jaysus Christ!' - which wasn't exactly calculated to lower it). And I have never been convinced that the world changed on a day where 3,000 Americans died, in a way it failed to when 8,000 boys and men died in Srebrenice. What makes an American life so much more significant? (sorry to any US readers, but more babies die each day from preventable poverty than the number of people who died on 9/11).
Yes, an atrocity is an atrocity, but don't talk about atrocities to a woman who lost grandparents among the six million who died in the Holocaust. I think I can claim atrocity priority. And I still believe that if the resources that are poured into the 'war on terror' were poured instead into a 'war on poverty' the world would in fact be a much more secure place. Not to mention the 'war on climate change' which is becoming more and more imperative.