I flicked the TV on late last night just to have a few minutes with a cup of tea before I went to bed. Normal programs on every chanel except 7 which was showing live images from London. It didn’t look too good but it took a while to work out that there had been at least one further incident there.
I wonder what is happening in our world. My hairdresser thinks its something that’s always been with us in one form or another. David Wright-Neville, speaking on Jon Faine’s program this morning thinks it is just the most visible of a global phenomenom. The news reports like to refer to “Islamic Extremists” but Neville points out there are Hindu extremists in India doing much the same thing and a Christian Extremist in the US has just been jailed for blowing up an abortion clinic.
This got me to thinking about alienation. How so many young people in our world just cannot find a reason to keep living. The more “things’ we have, the less we seem to enjoy them.
Alienation is stronger amongst minority communities. In Australia this, to our shame, is greatest amongst our indigenous people, but is also rife in the lowest socio-economic groups where unemployment has grown to epidemic proportions and there is simply no reason for hope.
It must also be orders of magnitude stronger in non-Western based communities in a world so overwhelmingly dominated by the West. Power, prosperity and culture, it must seem, are the province of Western/Christian civilisation. This regardless of the fact that modern civilisation is most definitely not a western construct. So the people of the Middle East, in particular are not only devoid of power and mass prosperity, but their cultural impact on the growth of the world as a whole is ignored.
It would be little wonder that alienation would be the predominant outlook of young people in these cultures. Little wonder also, then that not only do they feel they have nothing to live for, they also seek glory in reaping revenge as their final act.
I despair that Australian Prime Minister Howard, has no sense of this alienation. He himself felt alienation in the Australian political landscape when his views where piloried by what he saw as political correctness. In response he has developed his own PC where any mention of the causes of terrorism and extremism are seen as excuses for these acts. In this he refuses to allow that there are any causes for these world views other than the pure evil of their proponents. The only thing to do with evil, in his view, is to root it out. In this way, he has succumbed to the world view of the extremist/fundamentalist.
While our reaction to extremism is itself extreme, those who hold power will continue to hold it whilst at the same time suffering increasingly at the hands of the culturally alienated.
Our only hope is that people of moral and intellectual rigour on both sides will stand up and argue for a different path.
