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.