Of Childish Things...
When I was a boy, I remember a game where you had to bounce a ball as high and then try and pick up as many metal objects as possible whilst the ball was in the air. You then had to catch the ball with the same hand.
It was called ‘Jacks N Balls’, and consisted of mad moments of panic as you tried to cram as many things into your hand as possible.
I mention this digression into my distant childhood, because what is quickly becoming known as the US ‘Hogarth Plan’ to achieve a resumption of commercial whaling, reminds me of the panic of ‘Jack N’ Balls’. The panic, (and I mean that word, panic), of those who are trying to force through a deal with as many pieces that they can get, but with an attitude that it doesn’t quite matter how many final pieces there are and it doesn’t matter if the pieces actually all go together. Apparently its only important that the ‘moment is seized’ and a ‘deal is rammed through’.
And the analogy to children does not end there. Of course the rewarding of children for breaking the rules only teaches them that they can break the rules again.
The whalers are like children in a candy store. They have been told that they should not steal, but they just cannot resist, and when the shopkeeper finds that she cannot quite reach out to stop them, she has to revert to shouting to make them stop. The children then just take more and more, saying ‘if you allow us to have just a little without stealing, we shall never steal again’. Someone advises the shopkeeper that she will have to give in, but unknown to the shopkeeper there are other children looking in at the window, greedy to join in and seeing that the children in the store are getting away with it, they stand ready to ‘take just a little’ once the shopkeeper relents.
So what’s the answer? Do we use violence against the children? Of course not, violence just makes children retreat into themselves and harbour resentments that mean they grow even more determined to get their own way.
So what do we do? We don’t give in, - we make the children ‘grow up’ - and the maturity of being in a wider community shines a light on their childish, illegal, behavior. And as children grow up they put aside their childish things.
You can see WDCS comments on the original Irish Proposal of over ten years ago. Seems the Governments of the world have very short memories.
WDCS on Twitter
WDCS on Facebook
WDCS on YouTube