AT LEAST NERO WEPT AS HE “FIDDLED”
Compared to how today’s equivalents of emperors are dealing with crises and catastrophes, Nero being synonymous with “fiddling while Rome burns” is a bum wrap.… Read the rest
WHAT WE DON’T FEEL STILL HURTS U S
A single word holds the key to the myriad crises plaguing the world – dehumanisation. It is omnipresent in wars, policies on migrants and shortfalls in humanitarian aid. It has also become the bedrock of those who perpetuate the ills.… Read the rest
A DIFFERENT TAKE ON WISDOM FROM A DIFFERENT TIME
A poem many of my generation tacked on our bedroom wall included the line: “And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.” Depending on your point of view, that was either comforting or disconcerting. I wonder which one the author, American poet and writer Max Ehrmann, would have felt if he’d penned it today, rather than in 1927.… Read the rest
A LABEL CAN BE A LIFE SENTENCE
Here’s a simple test to validate the headline of this post.
From 2014 to March this year, 26,334 MIGRANTS/REFUGEES/EX-PATS died or went missing trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea from Turkey and North Africa.
Now rank the capitalised labels according to the chord they struck.
… Read the rest
CARING SHOULDN’T BE JUST AN AID PACKAGE
“Compassion”, the 19th century Polish philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer wrote, “ is the basis of morality.”
In a world sorely in need of copious amounts of it, compassion is both highly selective and hostage to a short attention span on the part of the public and the news media, the inevitable consequences of the way news is disseminated. … Read the rest
Racist War Reporting? I Beg to Differ…
According to a recent headline: “Coverage of Ukraine has exposed longstanding racist biases in Western media”. The thrust of that and similar articles was that reporters noting the victims were Europeans, rather than people we normally think of as being refugees, were guilty of racism. As a journalist who has covered more than a few conflicts, I beg to differ.… Read the rest