Truth and victorious peace: a scattered journey we live in a scattered world. Violence, wars, deaths of innocent children, imprisonment of children, the failure of institutions and the rise of the military industrial complex, the rise of mad men in power, the enemy within and without, scores of refugees in limbo, homeless people living on the streets and always in Australia the sanitised colonial history of colonisation and the ‘frontier wars’ that continue to brutalise First Nations people and justify imprisonment of ten-year old-children in the Northern Territory.
Authoritarian/colonised Australia continues to violate International law and the rights of the child. I am destabilsed by such suffering. I am trying to develop stabilising strategies.
I decide to start each day with an act of love. I tell myself it will keep me stabilised. I will visit Elly, a sweet, kind, generous loving man. He is my bootmaker. We share boots, beauty and philosophy as shared interests.
Elly is in a desperate state of grief, loss and fear. He has just heard that his family of 30 people have left their family home as it has been bombed. He has no idea where they are. He informs me that no one in Lebanon uses a mobile phone since the pagers were blown up in Lebanon. Despite this knowledge Elly keeps phoning Lebanon. He informs me of the imprisoned children, a weapon of war. 800,000 Lebanese people are now displaced since the war. I am aware that my feeling system is churning and spinning. Feelings that the Australian government would not approve. Not hostile feelings just deep sad, sad feelings.
I so believe in the beauty of peace but question this most fundamental value for humanity. As I leave Elly’s shop he calls, ‘I love you!’.
Leaning on my wheelie, I pass the homeless Indigenous folk sleeping and begging on the street. I am greeted by a youngster ‘gidday aunty granny’. I am comforted by this greeting. I pass the Indigenous graffiti ‘Aunty Mary is a scrumptious tart’. My sense of humour rises. I had also another purpose for the day. I realise that I cannot control these scattered forces and to write in scattered times begs patience from the reader. I will understand if patience has left town.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
