double dutch coiled against the sun

When people stop talking like friends or as if they were talking to a loved one, then arguments flow, the heart hardens and the ego takes over. It's me against you, kid. Like bickering children or academics: "you can't prove it" and..well, that's your point of view. Online formats rarely, in my opinion, foster the grace required for silence, letting go, actual listening.

Words: When the loved one says : "Do you love me?" then you know you're in trouble!

We grow up with set words, fixed images, cliches, stereotypes. These are, I guess, sometimes useful. But less so when one is on the receiving end of terms that are used-thinkingly or unthinkingly, deliberately or unwittingly. Words such as "Paki" or the now more common "Muslim" or "Jew" to set up an indelible boundary between 'us' and 'them', for example.

Distinctions, distinctions: Is it or is it not important to draw distinctions between the way in which words are used? Can one ignore the political ramifications of using the word 'nigger', for example? Or the market rhetoric that encourages us to think of certain qualities as 'things', commodities, alienable quantities. Everyone has "their price" we are told. "Human capital" or "collateral damage" mean what, exactly? If you see and think about other people as "dots or dreams" and not as human beings then how long before they become dots or dreams. How long before they become a number? Primo Levi.

As Ubo would say: get your priorities straight.

I grew up thinking West Indians (yeah, I thought it was a country) were the coolest people on earth (today I still can't help gloating and laughing at the thrashing that England were given). Partly down to Mr. Heinz, our black mayor who used to let me wear his gold chain of office...and then there were the Dutch, epitomized by Cruyff: cool, sophisticated, off-key, second-best.

I don't know what's happened to the Dutch, though. From culturally and politically liberal to...what? Hard to say. Need to read Buruma.

Pearson, the man who invited Wilders over, had this to say:

[Pearson said] he believed a Hitler-type figure should be allowed to speak in public in Britain. "I would go and laugh at him. You couldn't take him seriously, could you?" he said.

Er..yeah, except people did take him seriously.

We do not live just for one day. Freedom is the attempt to see clearly, to cancel out other versions, ignore certain views of things, to know what and when to forget, what and when to remember. What M is attempting to do is not just to see D accurately but to see her justly or lovingly.
--Iris. M.

Turn away now Jonah, Mark, if you're reading this. Yah, man!

'Don't you walk through my words
'Cause you ain't heard me out yet'

Dreadlock Holiday.mp3 - 10cc