Whoops...although the previous post might be construed, for its very succinctness, as a commentary on all western behaviour towards discovery in another world or one alien to its own, it was, simply, a mistake. For even this world of cyber technology is alien and untested to the likes of me. No, I felt shame in the past week when I viewed tv programmes about the church's collusion in covering up child abuse by its own members and then about church members defending that collusion. I felt shame when I overheard a customer in the pub I work in try to explain to her father that Hitler could not be blamed for the death camps because his signature never appeared on the death orders so he could not have known what was going on in the death camps. I felt shame when I watched Colin Farrell in a movie called The New World; not for Colin, whose acting, I thought, was exemplary, but because it portrayed the blindness with which the western world savaged those so-called savage lands of the new world, their people and their culture. I felt shame again when I considered how we waste our lives in the relentless pursuit of wealth to satisfy our greed and forget that the word is true then as it was in the beginning; that dust we art and into dust we shall return. You can't bring it with you, brother, sister. You can opnly wear one suit at a time; live in one home at a time and eat one meal at a time, so surely there's enough for us all?
Have we forgotten how to welcome strangers, share our lives and our homes? Have we forgotten the old Irish traditions of hospitality, not unlike, I must point out, those inherent in Muslim traditions when a stranger seeks shelter, it must be given for it is the will of Allah...it is also the will of ordinary decency and a humanity, apparently, forgotten.
