Again

[poliphilo]

FOOT AND MOUTH MONTH

March 2001

                            

This will go down as a vile month

With sappers burying long dead sheep

And Cumbria as dark with pyres

As Mordor. But that’s agribusiness.

Feed your beasts on funny stuff,

And kill the bugs and the meadow flowers.

And what do you expect? You wanna see

Nature at her bitching best?

You’ll have to come to town for that

And walk abandoned railway lines,

Or mooch about the derelict pits

And mills where no-one’s ever sprayed.

I step outside to fetch  the bin

And the grass behind the garages

Just ticks with life that won’t make money.


So Foot and Mouth  is back- this time on a farm in Surrey, or, at least, that's where it's been first detected- but the likelihood is they'll find it here, there and everywhere,  because it's so contagious.  The footage that was used to back the story on TV last night was presumably from the last outbreak- the dead cows being stacked like kindling, the smoking pyres. 

I see (from this poem I've dug up) I was quite angry in 2001. in 2007 I'm more inclined to shrug. Yeah, this is the kind of mess human beings get themselves into. So it goes. The difference is not just that I'm older, it's that Iraq has happened in the meantime. What are a few dead cows and sheep beside the humanitarian disaster we've caused over there? Maybe anger is the more appropriate response but I'm all angered out.  Anger just doesn't seem to get us anywhere, does it?

Comments

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Occasionally the individual can make a difference.

Dickens made a difference writing about the abuses of Victorian society.

The team that created the TV drama Cathy Came Home made a difference.

It depends on things like opportunity and talent and being in the right place at the right time.

But the millions of us who objected to the invasion of Irag don't seem to have made the slightest bit of difference- so I don't know...