The world is going crazy in all sorts of ways.
It’s not quite April but some parts of Spain, such as Murcia and Alicante. have already had temperatures up to 30° last weekend. It seems very early in the year for such high temperatures.
Across the Atlantic Mississippi was assaulted by tornadoes and storms, almost totally destroying a small town called Rolling Fork. Sometimes it seems as though the films and tv series must be exaggerating when they show scenes of small town and trailer park America and yet, there’s this place with picturesque name of Rolling Fork, with its population of about 2,000 people. 20% of the residents live below the poverty line and 21% live in mobile homes- well, probably not any longer. It’s bad enough hearing the wind and rain lashing against a well-insulated house so living in a caravan and having a tornado come along must be terrifying. I doubt that many of them remained standing.
Rolling Fork, by the way, is known as the birthplace of the Blues music pioneer Muddy Waters. I should think it would be enough to give anyone the blues!
There’s more in the news from the USA: a other school shooting incident. A 28 year old woman, armed with what the news report described as two “assault-style” weapons and a handgun, went into an elementary school in Nashville and opened fire. It seems she had planned it carefully, drawing a map for herself. She had other places in mind as well by all accounts. Why would anyone want to go and shoot junior school children, or any children or, indeed, any bunch of people at all?
Nashville chief of police John Drake said investigators believed the shooting stemmed from “some resentment” the young woman harboured “for having to go to that school” as a younger person.
Once again I find myself asking why anyone wants and, more importantly, is permitted to own an “assault-style” weapon. Personally I am not tempted to use violence on anyone. I gave up physically fighting even my older sister when I was about 9 years old. However, I have fairly often come across short-tempered people who would lash out with their fists at the slightest provocation. I imagine that such people, if they had a gun in their hands, could equally easily be provoked into shooting someone. Logically, therefore, it should be made very difficult for folk to have guns.
Frighteningly, it is reported that in 2020, guns overtook auto accidents as the leading cause of death among children and teens in the USA. And here in the UK, we’ve not come to that but every time I hear of yet another fatal stabbing, with teenage victim and perpetrator, I wonder where our statistics are going.
Then there’s Posie Parker, real name Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, a British anti-transgender rights activist who travels around the world organising events to promote anti-trans messages and ideas. No matter how you feel about the whole trans thing, she seems a bit extreme, to say the least. Anyway, she’s just been denied entry to New Zealand. I believe in free speech but I tend to feel New Zealand took the right decision.
I did wonder how she funds her travels but, then, she founded an anti-trans group called Standing for Women and has links with other such nominally feminist but really rather extreme groups. I read that she is a special adviser to the women’s rights organisation Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF), which is reported to have accepted a $15,000 donation from the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) – a global “religious freedom” organisation campaigning against abortion and LGBT rights. There you go!
So that’s the weather, guns, violence, extreme groups. What about politics? There’s this:
“Jeremy Corbyn will not stand as a Labour MP at the next general election, Keir Starmer will confirm at Tuesday’s national executive committee (NEC) meeting after he vowed to prove the party had changed under his leadership.”
Well, the party has certainly changed, with people suspended and expelled, often seemingly for not toeing the party line, like naughty schoolchildren. It may not be all down to Starmer but he is the current leader and leaders have to take responsibility for the state of things. So as the party of the “broad church” seems more concerned with everyone singing from the same hymn sheet than believing it is possible to have the same aims but still have differences of opinion, it must be largely his fault.
The world is crazy.
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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