Pass me the plough....

Monday morning, on the train and it’s a beautiful day.  One of those days you wish you were an unemployed bum and could do nothing but sit around in it.  Alas, it is not the case and I am suited up for Monday.  Still sore from the weekend’s activities, but not that bad.

Its days like this that you stop to think about what you’re about and why you’re here and what it all means.  On such a day, I wear a suit and tie, sit on a train to get to an office to punch out paperwork and emails about boring stuff and you say “why am I doing this?”  The simple answer is because you have a family to support and a house to keep from being repossessed and that’s a valid answer.  But what about deeper reasons… Why do I spend 13hrs a day out of the house to pay for a house that I rarely get to be in?  Then you start thinking about democratic capitalism (yes, I know that’s a big jump, but it’s the way I think) and you start to think about “western society” and being in so called First World country in comparison to subsistence farmers in a Third World country (where is the second world?).

The video clip I posted up on Thursday called Miniature Earth is a prime example of what I am talking about.  For starters, if you’re reading this, you’re in the 3% of people who have an internet connection, and you realise that you’re an incredibly lucky individual.  That video clip has prompted a lot of my friends and work colleagues who have seen it to say things like “Wow, that was really good… makes you think doesn’t it”.  And yes it does make you think.  What I found most stunning about that clip was that for every 100 people on the planet we spend $1.2 trillion dollars on military / defence costs.  Why?  Why the fuck are we spending so much on planes, bombs, payroll for soldiers and all other military expenditure.  $1.2 trillion for every 100 people.  Astounding.

Then you this mornings news about some “expert” in Islamic study claiming that Australian mosques are recruiting young men for Jihad and suicide bombing.  Then you have the Pope slamming Islam causing a nun in Somalia to be murdered and Christian churches in the Middle East to be fire bombed.  Why?

The plain and simple reason is that given that the political foes of the largest spenders of military dollars (the US) have collapsed in upon themselves (except for Communist China) then the next theatre of war has to be based on religion.  If political boundaries are no longer worth fighting for because the world has become a smaller place to live in, then the next avenue for keeping those Defence contracts buoyant are wars based on religious ideals.

Then with that $1.2 trillion figure ringing in your ear, you can see why this is all happening and you can see why “experts” spruiking anti-Muslim rhetoric that gets on the lead story of our morning sugar coated pro-Anglo Saxon news is now so vital for keeping the general populace aware of the “great evil” that is Islam.  We’re playing with a hornets nest and we’re willingly stirring up the Muslim people of the world and want retaliatory strikes (denounced as Terrorism) so that we can spend some more military dollars.

Then you realise wouldn’t the world be a better place if we had cut out the spending, cut out the “work for the economy” lifestyle and all the worlds population be driven by the basic necessities of food and shelter and we all were the atypical subsistence farmer.

Then we could perhaps be able to enjoy days like today…