No Simple Answers

Getting old/older has finally taught me that there are no simple answers to anything, even old age itself. Last night a Panorama programme left me thinking the unthinkable - that I could, in another life, possibly, understand a person's motivation for wanting to become a soldier.

Childhood experience of being an army officer's child (for which there is no space to go into here - or anywhere for that matter), left a bitter taste in my mouth with regard to all things military. I have never been able to understand the brutal principles of war - the Geneva Convention being perhaps the most ludicrous - and I have never really been able to stomach the arrogance of those who espoused/delivered them. But since last night I am a born again something or other, with a new view of the world.

No, I still cannot justify the killing of Afghan civilians, either by the British Army (in it's UN guise) or by the Taliban (Afghans themselves). Neither am I able to understand how and why these so-called 'contacts' with the other side have to involve the destruction of unconnected people's homes and livelihoods, but now I can at least claim an appreciation of the complexity of this particular problem and others like it. So well done Panorama.

The, very personal, view of soldiers caught up in the mesh of political arguments which (even at officer level, they do not profess to understand) was the most poignant revelation of army life I have ever seen - concluding in the commanding officer's emotional breakdown when he mentioned his wife (all the more shocking because he had been so stoical and rational up to that point). This, alongside the desperate plea from local people that the British Army stay to protect them from the Taliban, revealed an array of issues my, previously, immovable pacifism had managed to overlook, with the result that I am quite simply confused and depressed, but perhaps this is not such a bad starting point, or at least a more honest one, for beginning the search for solutions.

And then, as if my life weren't complicated enough, this morning I read a George Monbiot article about the reality of biofuels. Far from being the fluffy, green alternative to the filthy, pernicious and fast disappearing petroleum based fuels we now use, biofuels are in fact far worse in terms of the land they are grown on and the air they are blasted into - e-image me now, poor old hag, head in hands, bemoaning the state of the world. But, on this at least, he has supported a personal hobby horse (horses do not produce as much methane as cows) of mine - the solution is not in finding another fuel, but in changing our need for it in the vast quantities we use today.

In all of this despair, and it is a very real despair and fear for the future (more specifically my daughter's future - yes I allow myself this degree of perfectly natural selfishness - human gene and all that) I have another depressing thought ... I am burbling into a vast e-ether where blogs flicker and die like glow worms in the night and no one is listening to me, me, me. An embarassing problem I will find impossible to share (though maybe I just did), but one, thank the Lord, that can be easily solved ... I'll just call go back to calling my blog a diary.