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 'Loose Talk'
By Benjamin Benedict
The Locust Years
This is the heading of an early chapter in the first of Sir Winston Churchill’s six volumes on The Second World War. It comes from The Bible, ‘The years that the locust hath eaten.’ – Joel, ii, 25. Winnie was referring to the years when nothing was done, although the menace was clearly there to be seen.
I had hoped that we were emerging from just such a period, but when I hear Barack Obama pledge to end America’s dependency on Middle Eastern oil, I wonder if we are still not stuck deep in it. What then are you going to depend on, Barack? South American oil, Nigerian oil, Russian oil, or maybe you reckon on destroying the Alaskan ecology, in which case perhaps you should swap running mates with McCain?
This is symptomatic of the conventional stance towards many of the subjects that I have covered over the last couple of years, and today it seems that there is not a politician on the planet who truly gets ‘The Big Picture’. But are they to blame when it is primarily down to us; you and me. The way democracy works is that politicians listen to what we say and react accordingly. That is how they get elected. It is we, the public that will cause or not ‘….the unleashing upon the world of horrors and miseries which, even so far as they have already been unfolded, are already beyond comparison in human experience’. To quote Churchill’s closing remarks from that chapter.
How unaware and perhaps uncaring can we be? Well, to return to the outset of The Second World War, by a stroke of luck my father and his sister squeezed onto the last couple of ships which left the North Coast of France, with the German Army racing across Belgium towards them. I would like to say that they were on some heroic, last ditch, military mission, but the fact is that they were on holiday!
The issues of Global Warming, Pollution, Poverty, Population, Health, Energy, Renewable Recourses, Education, Trade, and Weapons, are matters that we must all consciously address if we are to expect our leaders to pay anything but lip-service to them. In today’s world, all these titles start with the word ‘Global’, and it is inanely presumptive to think about dealing effectively with them on a national scale. National moves can certainly be made, but that is as far as it goes. We need to push our representatives into the International Arena on an ever increasing basis. Business is already way ahead of us. There is little or no control over International Business, and it is not hard to see that we are suffering the consequences.
It is also no good for someone to say, “I am heavily involved in this or that very worthy cause, and I have simply no time to waste on these broad-based topics.” I have news for you, dear one. Your very worthy cause will be hit way past the long grass and into the trees unless you do spend some time considering this information.
We won’t agree on solutions, but we can agree that they must be found, and found right away. If we don’t have a clue as to what the problems really are, they won’t be. We need to see action, but without some form of conscious, individual effort at understanding the mess we are in, there is no hope of our leaders being able to tackle the situation and stay in office. That is after all, how our hard-won freedom works.
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