Day Eleven: "I am older than my father and younger than my son."

Day Eleven.


My son came to see me today. He's seven thousand seven hundred and ninety-eight days old. Or thereabouts. Give or take a little here and there. Hopefully he will correct me if I'm wrong.

He's younger than me.

Only he is not.

Because he is also one generation down the evolutionary chain. Evolutionary speaking he is older than me.

I used to say that I am older than my father and younger than my son. That is, because I am one generation further down the evolutionary scale than my father, but one generation further back than my son.

The future lies with the children. Therefore we should learn from them. It is their future, not ours.

Shall I tell you what seems the most immoral thing to me? It is younger people dying at the behest of older people. It is young Americans, young Brits, young Australians, young Iraqis, young Palestinians, young Jews - young people - who have not yet lived their lives, dying because an older generation tells them to.

There is the only measure of death.

People die.

When they die they should be mourned and then they should be honoured.

Then they should be let go of.

Usually a child should see his parents off.

Sometimes (as in the case of the Asian Tsunami) the death is arbitrary, and there is no meaning in the event.

There is no answer to the question "why".

We live, we die, we move through the surge of history for no particular reason.

The only time this changes is when the death is man-made, when, that is, there is something we can do about it.

In the case of the Tsunami, we can help the living.

In the case of Iraq, we can stop the killing.

In the case of ourselves we can wake up to the real nature of our current world and realise that profit and death are conterminous and that individual wealth and individual privilidge are eating the soul from this world.

That is: rule by the few for the few, against the many, is the enemy of the human race.

Them against us.

Class.

The rich versus the poor.

In the end, who's side do you take?

Poor? Rich?

Or do we forgive them all?

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