To Libya with love

We see the carnage on Twitter.  We want it to stop.  As Western Europeans/ North Americans, we reach for the tools to do that.  Call on Obama.  Email the EU Commission.  March on the embassy.  Campaign to motivate NATO.

I am reading Amin Maalouf's "The Crusades through Arab Eyes".  It is as gut-wrenching as the photos I am clicking through on Twitter.  Disembowellment.   Siege.  Starvation.

The theme that Maalouf, ever the watchful eye for Arab dissension, returns to again and again, is the inability of the tribes to band together to fight off the Franj.

A thousand years later, and the Franj are still raping half a continent of all its resources, secure in the knowledge that the strong man in Arab politics rules by divide and conquer.  And in between those two positions is where the money is made.

Coming from Ireland, I know what that does to a country's soul.

The crusades may have been about the 'holy place' for a simple man, a second son, tramping through the desert in the hot sun, but further up the food chain there was money to be made.  As always.

So here's the thing.

Maybe we should do nothing except try to stop the modern day Crusaders - Blair and his cronies - from heading in to mop up the spoils.  Maybe that's our job.  Maybe our job is to encircle this nascent democracy and protect it from our own with all our might.

Maybe this is a fight that is a long time in coming.  Maybe it has to be, like that time when you spent all night trying to prevent two friends from brawling in a bar and then realised, they really really really wanted to kick the shit out of each other.  Because that is the only way they are ever going to sort out whatever it is that keeps them apart. 

Bone crunching on bone.  If it were us, it would be a Coen Brothers movie. 

But it's not us.

It's real.

I don't know.  I just know that I was on the winning side in 1096 and a thousand years later, as a woman, I am still not allowed be a minister in a catholic church.  Or get divorced.  I am still the ludicrous object of a million ridiculous poems and songs of a type of courtly love that could only be invented by ten thousand monks on the march across the middle east in a drought.

If Justin Bieber was alive in 1096, he would have been a Crusader.

We are at a strange point in our history when we are calling on a black man in a white house to sort out a fight that has been a thousand years in the making.  If I was Obama, I would be making the point that both Libyans (and Egyptians, and Tunisians) and Europeans spent most of the last millennium making money off the trade in slaves of people just like him.

Why on earth should he step in?

Me, I would wonder where the Arab brothers are right now.

If February were a blog post...

Almost half-way through February.  It's starting to sag though, the positive attitude.

Frozen branch near Terminal Beach, 2011

February is very difficult in Canada.  January, you have had Christmas vacation and a bit of a rest and you are just getting started with the real snow and the cold.  There's a sense of settling in for a spell of it, the winter projects kick in, the NHL gets interesting, and when it's fit to go out, there's sledding, and skating, and ski-joring or ski-ing or whatever it is you do to stay one step away from catatonic.

Also, there's still February - April to get through, so you don't want to over-think anything.

The end of January is a bit of a milestone though!  Cheers you right up for a minute.

And February is a short month.  The positive attitude gets a surge.  In the second week of February, the days stretch perceptibly at each end, so I am now driving to and from work in the dawn/ dusk, as opposed to the pitch black of January.  I can see the ice and snow on the road.  I feel less scared.  The cold makes for some pretty spectacular dawns.

Easy, peasy...

So here's the thing.

Round about the tenth of the month, you remember that February is not a short month.

In fact it is not a month at all.

February is in fact the moment in time when the long-suffering son-in-law of the meanest, coldest-assed, tightest-fisted, mascara-dripping bitch who ever produced a spoilt blonde turns away from the nagging to stoke the fire, but instead picks up the poker and hefts it.

If February was a scene in a movie it would be the Tommy Lee Jones soliliquy at the end of no Country for Lost Men.

If February was a book, it would be written by Franz Kafka.

If February was a song, Joy Division would have recorded it.

February is when the light is so harsh that every line on your face, every grey hair on your head is screaming 'LOOK AT ME EVRYONE, LOOKAT MEEEE'.

February is when the Caribbean music on your iTunes makes you cry instead of dance.

February is when your body has had enough of minus 28 and just wants to sleep all day and eat all night.  But you have to haul it to and from an office with forced air heating that makes your skin crawl.

I was on the phone with a federal colleague the other day, and I couldn't find my words in a week of not being able to find my words (not good in a week with an interview) and I said 'I'm sorry, i can't find my words, I have February Brain' and she said "THAT'S EXACTLY WhAT IT IS!!!!!!!!!!! I haVe it Too"

And that's the real problem.  We all have it at the same time, so life is a little grumpy right now.

Thankfully the Canada Games are on now, so the kids are off school for two weeks.  The disgustingly positive people have all gotten extra days off to volunteer.  The disgustingly selfish people are taking advantage of cheap trips to the Caribbean.

And the rest of us....

Hopefully there will be enough people gone out of the office that we can all hide in our offices, watch people having revolutions in countries where you can actually stand on the street for more than five minutes at a time.... and ignore each other in peace for the rest of the month.

Nearly only five weeks to the Equinox.
Eight weeks to the fishing season!!

Stay warm everyone.