No Escape from Reality

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“Conservatives divide the world in terms of good and evil while liberals do it in terms of the rich and poor.”
- Dennis Prager

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Maybe I'm a filophile. Someone who loves cataloging - certainly I do enough of it. Today I emptied two hard disks of stuff and catalogued the results as:

* 3 DVDs worth of miscellaneous mp3s
* 4 DVDs on how to mix and master music like the professionals
* 2 DVDs on how to sing like a heavy metal god without making your throat bleed
* 1 DVD on music theory
* A few dozen DVDs concerning, um, acts of healthy physical intimacy among consenting adults
* Some more of the same, but with women in them for my straight friends.
* Ebooks on how to write stories
* Lots and lots of software, some of it with documentation telling me what it does
* Snippets of 15 or 20 infomercials for fitness and kitchen products, edited into a video for one of my songs. Someday I might get around to finishing it.

My favourite fitness product was nothing more than a vibrating plastic square, retailing for GBP150. To exercise any muscle group, you had to balance on the plate in such a way that you would flex the muscles to avoid falling off when it shook. Genius.

There was a load of stuff I'd forgotten, including some short stories and abandoned essays, some which I'll post over the next week.

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And in the evening, a forum on Palestine. Hosted by the Portsmouth Network for a Fair Settlement to the Arab-Israel conflict, or some such convoluted name.

As is traditional, the talk was illustrated with the help of a laptop/projector combination - which went traditionally wrong. Guess who fixed it.

The speaker was an 18 year old christian kid who'd gone on a tour of the territories under the auspices of some church organisation. He was "assisted" by a middle-aged woman who seemed to be under the delusions that (a) she needed to spend fifteen minutes introducing him, (b) she was talking to the Women's Institute instead of 25 politically experienced types, and (c) that every point he made needed to be amplified by her telling a long anecdote. Intensely annoying women.

Once he was a allowed to speak, he spoke eloquently of the realities of living in Palestine under Israel. The way the army constantly harass and often torture Palestinians - and only Palestinians, the absurd complexities of passes and visas, the incredible poverty gap between occupiers and occupied, the way some Israeli citizens casually use Palestinians as target practice for stones or bullets, and of course The Wall. An enormous winding barrier that provides zero security and chops up the area in ways that make no sense except as intimidation.

He even touched on the way acknowledgement of these facts is commonly called "anti-semitism". Being a fluffy liberal of course, he had no notion of what might be a solution, beyond the undefined term "peaceful resistance". Arms were not helpful apparently, because if you start by shooting your enemy, you'll end by shooting your friends. He even admitted that he had absolutely no idea whether a one or two state solution would be preferable, or even feasible.

It's always disappointing when people get angry about injustice and barbarity, determine that the situation is intolerable and something needs urgently to be done...and then ask god to do it for them. Presumably because it absolves them of any responsibility to do anything themselves, or think too deeply about a real solution.

Not that I've got a real solution to offer. I just know praying isn't part of it.

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