The Arsebishop of Canterbury has been wittering again. Apparently the naughties have been terrible. However, he has a solution of sorts:
He called on people to try to respond to problems that were geographically remote in the same way that they would to those closer to home.
Good grief! There is a reason that we do not treat tragedies in far flung places in the same way that we deal with personal tragedies close to home; we’d go insane.
Williams, frankly, appears to have done just that.
I thought we were pretty good at responding to far flung tragedies, the response to the tsunami that hit in Indonesia and Sri Lanka was hardly a shrug of the shoulders.
Anyway, twats like him who campaign against free trade and more globalisation do more damage than the odd twitch of Gaia.
.-= My last blog ..Some festive music to bring in the New Year =-.
Charity begins at home, he really ought to remember that.
I believe his exact words were: “Let’s respond just as we do when our immediate family is in need or trouble.” Which is lovely and, umm, collective, isn’t it?
And impossible.
As GS points out, we do respond with practical help and aid in the event of tragedies. What we cannot do, nor should we try, is to respond to all of them as if they involved close family or friends. We’d all go nuts if we tried.
Yes, charity DOES begin at home. The first thing I would do as PM of an incoming government would be to end all overseas aid handouts except for specific disaster funds. In particular, I wouldn’t send a penny to countries where there is civil war and internecine strife or who purchase arms from abroad. Let them sort out their own mess – as we should be doing.
The Archbishop is intelligent in an abstract way, but has little common sense and no guts as his maladministration of his own church shows. Who appointed him? Tony Blair, of course….
Perhaps the Archbishop hopes that worrying about the consequences of ‘acts of god’ such as tsunamis in the geographically remote Far East will distract us from worrying about the consequences of acts of priests in religious institutions closer to home in the British Isles.