It's a bad world

Today, a report of a man fighting off a toddler for a life jacket in the Christmas Island boat tragedy.

There is a good, selfish reason to be generous, to refuse to be defensive about border protection. The sight of human indecency is shameful - and I think that reaction is there because there is never nothing to be done. Primo Levi talks about the suspension or transvaluation of morality in a Nazi concentration camp. Those who had real virtue quickly starved by sharing with the even hungrier. Then as now, the earth produced more than enough food for its inhabitants.

Primo Levi - (Wikipedia translation)

If...

You who live safe
In your warm houses,
You who find, returning in the evening,
Hot food and friendly faces:
Consider if this is a man
Who works in the mud,
Who does not know peace,
Who fights for a scrap of bread,
Who dies because of a yes or a no.
Consider if this is a woman
Without hair and without name,
With no more strength to remember,
Her eyes empty and her womb cold
Like a frog in winter.
Meditate that this came about.
I commend these words to you.
Carve them in your hearts,
At home, in the street,
Going to bed, rising;
Repeat them to your children.
Or may your house fall apart,
May illness impede you,
May your children turn their faces from you.

I would be interested to know whether this is consciously against the Rudyard Kipling 'If'. The fact is, there are, for all of us, circumstances that have us clutching, that reduce us to the fierce amoral animal, old man. Come new man.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7