Thank you for agreeing these aren't stories of Jihad. And I agree with you that their religion is having an awful influence on their lives in general.
I get it, I really do. What I wonder tho is do you get the irony? A whitey talking about a sense of superiority and entitlement, about colonising being so backward it's hard to imagine - it's as if our predecessors hadn't done anything like that at all!
which they did, Jim. I grew up in a stable well provisioned society. Africa was the blood-stained spectre attending the feast.
All my life, ever since I can remember having a single thought about Africa beyond coo look at that elephant, I have thought there is no way we can fix things to be friends again - what happened there, it's much too bad. It still scares me to think about it.
And then I came to Australia. The history of colonisation here is as terrifying and awful as anywhere else and it's up close and personal. The aborigines have had unbroken possession of this land for a long long time, their brutal displacement only happened a couple of hundred years ago. In remote places they still have ownership in terms of unbroken possession, if not in terms of our law.
Somehow tho, no matter that we feel the history in our bones, there is a gentleness and friendliness of spirit that comes across. and sometimes you hear stories of what they are doing that show an amazing potential towards a future of living well with our past.
It's alright. I still think we're all doomed.
there always seems to be at least some bad people around to trample anything good or useful into the ground.
