I am troubled by our World.
News of the latest atrocity to hit France was just beginning to break as I went to bed last night. This morning I awoke to the awful news that a madman had deliberately driven a truck into crowds of celebrating families in Nice, France. Over eighty innocent revellers, most of them children and young people, had been murdered before the perpetrator had also been killed.
The horror that has been afflicting my beloved France and her people in recent times fills me with great sadness.
Looking around though, it’s not just La France where this all-consuming hatred manifests into violence, intolerance and hatred.
Should we be surprised in this “modern age” when Police Officers are murdered on the streets of Dallas; pilgrims blown up in Saudi Arabia, car bombs tear through crowds in Turkey…?
The sad truth is that intolerance surrounds us in our selfish times.
There is a young lady in her early twenties who lives near Dookes H.Q., sadly she is more likely to greet people with a torrent of abuse than a smile. Is she a grim representative of the future, where isolation, lack of respect and offence are the norm, rather than attempts at understanding and the reaching out of a hand? Or is she a product of the world that past generations have created for the future? A sad indication that the social freedoms and lack of responsibility in the latter half of the twentieth century have failed?
It certainly seems to me that there are many more angry and destructive people around today. Why are there so many disenfranchised?
Or is it me? Am I demonstrating a function of getting older and possibly loosing touch with popular society?
I don’t think it is.
This week I came across a school group of fourteen year olds, they were visiting Cornwall on an “enrichment week.”
Were they helping out in a local hospital?
Assisting in a retirement home?
Doing a shift in an inner-city help shelter?
No.
They had been taken out of school for a week of surfing!
Now, I love surfing, but please….how will this in any way enrich the future lives of these young people?
The world is truly doomed when we teach that “enrichment” does not equal caring for, or about others before oneself.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe we should just extract as much enjoyment from life as we can in the desperately brief time that we have and stuff everything else.
It’s a little difficult to know at the moment.
Je suis Nice.
Je suis Français.
Dookes
A candle for Nice.
A candle for peace in the world. Chapel of Notre-Dame du Haut.
Hogrider Dookes 
Excellent post. I join your heavy heart for Nice. Please be encouraged. Evil has always been with us. Love has always kept going, never reveled in the defeat of others, and never failed to give us hope and light for the future. I know of 20 year old girls who know this. I know of 30 year old men who have discovered this. Let’s keep lighting candles in the darkness.
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Great words my friend and just what I needed.
Thank you.
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France is paying a heavy price but you’re right, it’s not just France. I do believe we’ll emerge from it all one day but not for many years. There’s hope as long as we care, and we’re never going to stop caring.
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I was having a conversation with a client the other day in which we both agreed that we, as a species, seem to be regressing. Terrorism and racial rhetoric throughout the world seem to be pitting Christians against Muslims once again. Here at home, regionally in the deep south, we seem to be reliving the 1960’s ; cops vs. blacks. Here in my own town, Black Lives Matter protests have disrupted the city for four days, with police forces everywhere one looks. Are tear gas and riots next? I have no answers. Vive la France.
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I woke up in Barcelona yesterday to this horrible news after spending four wonderful days in France, and flew back home to the U.S. where, as Bob says, we are experiencing our own senseless, tribal violence. I have to believe that the power of Love and prayer and goodness that is in all of us, every single one of us, is stronger than the hate that resides in the few who do such evil. Viva la France Dookes!
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I share all your thoughts and feelings, and thank you for being my voice in this instance. I’ve wanted to write a similar post, but have honestly been too emotional from all the disgusting acts of violence that have taken place as of late. Here in the USA, we can’t even peacefully protest anymore, as was discovered in the Dallas Texas sniper attack a few weeks ago. Each day I pray for peace, and for love to rule over hate, and that is really my only salvation as I feel like I am witnessing the beginning of the end.
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Steve, thank you for your comments and support.
I feel a ride to somewhere remote and peaceful coming on.
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😥❤️ so sad D
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Your post touches my heart. I have no words to convey how I feel at all the negative that is happening in our world. Thanks for verbalizing how so many of us feel.
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