Breaking News

I would love it if one morning I turned on the news and heard a bulletin which went like this:  "Early this morning an Israeli battalion of hardened irrigation engineers stormed into the Gaza Strip, their spokesman said "We have only one mission, we are here and we are going to stay here until we have set up irrigation systems and built a couple of dams to support the crops these people grow".  Meanwhile, in Somalia the "International Brigade" of teachers supported by builders with earth movers have just finished building their twentieth school and classes have begun for the children of the twenty areas this action involves... We can go across live to our reporter who is embedded with a platoon of "Queens Own Highlanders", these brave soldiers parachuted into Helman Province, Afghanistan carrying solar panels which will be installed in isolated villages which have no electricity"..

If I heard that kind of bulletin I would think I had died and passed over.  Now, I enjoyed writing that silly paragraph and you can say it's a load of cracked ideas but I wonder.  The reason I wrote it was as an antidote to the London visit of Mitt Romney and his "World Tour of Trouble Making" and all the other war mongers who move around the world trying to resurrect the Cold War, protected by their wealth from the consequences of their actions.  When I had been thinking about Romney it occurred to me that actually we don't live in a world you can make old constructs come back to life.  If you just look at your own life;  I have friends on Facebook from all over the place, I support peaceful projects in lots of different countries, we Twitter to people all over the world and don't forget e-mail, sign petitions which do make a difference, read blogs, build dialogues through our comments and everything is instantaneous (or nearly, if you used my computer some mornings you would doubt that).  This virtual society is happening all over the world, it is what has partly triggered the "Arab Spring", the "Orange Revolution" and all the other movements for change.  Of course there are wars and atrocities, man made disasters and horrors but it seems to me that there are a lot of very brave (and you do have to be brave to light a candle in the dark), decent, honourable people working to stop the wars, mediate in the middle of the suffering, change our splintered societies into one global society.  Our technology has already made this happen in the virtual world.  I really do look forward to the day the virtual and the real worlds merge and the news presenter says "Yesterday, in the Hague, a peace treaty was signed between the two last combatants in the last war.  Today is the first day of peace"..