Womanist

Rants from a Jamaican British Woman

Friday, September 03, 2004

good way of finding out what you are up to. I think the Brits should revoke your citizenship of this country and send you back to Ireland where you come from. How dare you attack my NOT favourite Prime Minister?Womanist

.: posted by womanist 8:15 AM

What a strange world we live in. Now we have babies and small children being taken as hostages by grown men who say they are seeking 'justice' for a particular cause. It does strike me that whilst men go on to believe that 'two wrongs' can make ' a right' that our world is going to remain a pretty messy place. I never would have thought I would hear myself saying this, but I do feel sorry for the Russians. If they give in to these maniacs, forget dropping aeroplanes on buildings full of adults, all the maniacs around the world will take to kidnapping babies and pregnant women to use as their bargaining tools. The endless wars for so-called justice, peace, freedom etc are all being played very dirty indeed. Shame on these men of violence. The poor children caught up in this horror will no doubt be scarred for life. How can they seriously expect anyone to empathise with their cause, when they have sunk so very low. If there really is a God, I suggest she/he come and take this world.

.: posted by womanist 7:38 AM

Thursday, September 02, 2004

My heart goes to the social worker, the only person to be sacked over the Climbie case. Anyone who knows anything about child protection also know the impossible tasks that so many social workers are faced with. A social worker who is at or near burn out and who probably has managers who are equally overwhelmed is in a dangerous place indeed. Ms Arthurworthy admits that she made mistakes. What about her managers, and their managers? They have admitted nothing and presumably still have their jobs. And now we have had the endless enquires and we are being assured that the checks and balances are in place to stop this happening again. The truth is, it will happen again, as long as there are humans involve in trying to manage the human misery of others. What is really amazing is that we don't have more child deaths in this country. Surely that is a credit to endless overworked, underderpaid, exhausted social workers around the country. Let us stop knocking and demonising the people we pay to do our dirty work. Train social workers better, pay them better, give them more time off to recharge their exhausted batteries, treat them with a little more respect. And understand that there is not a system in place that can prevent every child death and sadly I belive there never will be.

.: posted by womanist 8:36 AM

I am resigned to the fact that Bush will be back in the White House for the next 4 years. Well done to the media for keeping the American people in the dark about Bush's indulgences at home and in the rest of the world. And well done to a large proportion of the American people for behaving like blinkered Jackasses. I am not even upset about this inevitability. After all, the citizens of Britain practically willed in a labour governemt, after Thatcher, and look what we got. We have a saying in the Caribbean, where I originally hail from. The gist of which is "Be careful what you wish for, because you might just get it".

.: posted by womanist 8:17 AM

The situation being faced by the Black Sudanese people has been much on my mind. I am trying hard to figure out in my head the response of the West to the nightmare that is the life of these people. When America and Great Britain declared war on Iraq, they initially told the world that they did this in order to save the Iraqi people from the brutality of their leader Saddam Hussein. Later other justications were added such as 'saving our world from some future threat to world peace and world democracy, searching out and finding Iraq's WMD's etc.' Now we have an entire government in Sudan who have armed militia men up to their teeth and are basically supporting them in killing and uprooting the lives of hundreds of thousands of their country men, women and children, and what is the response of the West? The UK sent in Foreign Sectretary Jack Straw to tell the Sudanese Government to stop their support to the militia men. And what do you know! They threw away their guns immediately. Yes, Right..And as for the American response, George Bush's 'moral' leadership does not seem able to extend its long arms to countries where the people are predominantly Black and poor, Rwanda was another case in point. I guess one truth is, that Sudan has nothing that the West needs or wants, so they will be simply left to rot in their own hell. And as for us the people and the so-called conscience of governments, the fact is the 24 hour in your face bombardment which we call news which fills our living room with starving, brutalized people's around the world no longer moves us. The way the news is told to us leaves us unable to sift fact from fiction. To most of us, the only reality is own over indulged little lives. Even with my own over indulged little life, I sometimes think that if I was told that the world was really coming to an end tomorrow, I would say, good. It would be good to know that not even our Western privileges could save us. The human race would be equal at last, equally terrified to give up on this thing we call life. Perhaps only then would we even momentarilly be able to experience the pain of all the people we in the West are so compliant in disreagarding and destroying.