Hello Is There Anybody There?

The gentle art of conversation is dead and gone. We used to talk. We all used to talk. We used to have conversations about everything. We used to give each other advise about relationships, clothes, parents, jobs, haircuts, just about anything you could mention. We used to meet face to face. We would telephone each other and chat for hours. That was then. These are memories I've dredged up from the past. Now, today, we send emails and text. We communicate with a language of short, snappy phrases and abbreviations. In our hurry its not just the words that we abbreviate. We've cut short our conversations. Lost are the messages communicated through body language and tone of voice. We've lost the ability to look each other in the eye and deliver a message and recieve a message that is much more than mere words. We hide behind usernames and anonymous comments. We disguise what we really think behind cynical comments designed to be uber cool. An honest conversation, now thats a scarey concept.

No Answers

The shootings in Virginia yesterday are hard to take your mind off. We've become so desensitised to the indescribable awfulness that is Iraq that the news reports from there barely scrape by on the radar. When a killing on such a large scale happens in the US or anywhere in the West it lands right on the radar. There are lots of discussions in the ether as to why that is and why we should feel guilty and I don't want to get into that here. What I am trying to understand is why someone turns into a killing machine and once they've started they can't stop. We are all capable of horrendeous acts but what is it that prevents most of us from turning into monsters and lets others run riot? Supposedly the murderer was reacting to being jilted by his girlfriend. If we imagine that he couldn't stand the thought of his girlfriend with another man, the thought is so unbearable that the only way he can deal with it is to destroy them. He needs to restore control in his life. He needs to feel that he has some power over his life. He uses his ultimate power, the power to take life. Does he think about what he's doing? Does it all happen in a rage? Is he calm for the four hours or so that this all took place. Why did murder become the only solution he could find for his problems. Was he wired differently to the rest of us? Is it fair to focus so much on the murderer and not his victims? His legacy, their legacies are these feeling that we are all experiencing.

May Flowers

Talking today my mum bemoaned the youth for forgetting old traditions. She told us that when she was a wee lass on May Day all doorsteps would be covered with flowers. We asked her why this was done but she didn't know just that back in the 40s and 50s in small town Ireland everybody collected wild flowers and laid them on their doorsteps. Doing a little searching I found out that this came from a mixture of Celtic traditions of celebrating Bealtaine (May) and Roman celebrations of the goddess of Flowers. The flowers were to keep all evil spirits from the house and more specifically in Ireland to keep the pesky fairies from the door. I don't know about the fairies but I really like the idea of celebrating spring and bringing some colour and new life to the house. I might just revive this tradition next month and see of any of my neighbours follow suit?