Six Degrees of Separation

I thought of asking Jill Carroll if any of her captors, or their cronies, had shown her any kindness during her 82 days of captivity. On 8 May, The Christian Science Monitor invited its readers to put questions to Jill. Unfortunately, this invitation seems to have been online for a mere 24 hours — I only came across it a day or so after the deadline.

Yet the link seemed to work still, so I filed my question under “What do you want to ask Jill Carroll?” I’ve had no response and it doesn’t seem as though anything’s been added to the update blog since. In fact, the Monitor has gone very quiet on Ms Carroll.

So who else do we know of who was vulnerable in the presence of enemies? Norman Kember? Surely there aren’t that many links between me and someone who knows him? Norman Kember’s gone very quiet too, though it’s not hard to see why both Jill Carroll and Norman Kember have every reason to seek refuge from further inquisition.

And how do I find an Iraqi who can testify to a humane gesture from an American soldier?

Will the people who constitute the six degrees of separation between me and any of these, please step forward?

An Audience in Beirut

I've remembered an article, written by Robert Fisk, that I read some time ago. It appeared in The Independent, but unfortunately you have to pay to read most, if not all, of Fisk's articles in their archive. This charging to view really does bother me, not least because it goes against the original idea of the Internet as being freely accessible to all. I've managed to find a different link to the article, which I've added to the links under Breaking the Mould - it's to the right of this page.

Fisk was encouraged by the response of "a Muslim audience in Beirut ... most of them in their 20s" to the moment in Kingdom of Heaven when Saladin sent his own doctors to a Christian king.

He wrote, "At this, there came from the Muslim audience a round of spontaneous applause. They admired this act of mercy from their warrior hero; they wanted to see his kindness to a Christian".

Yes, the event they applauded happened centuries ago, but the Lebanon is a nation recently ravaged by war and a country where still today brave men and women are being targeted by assassins.

I salute that audience. This generation inspires hope.

Blog addiction

Last Thursday to Goldsmith's Hall to hear Helena Kennedy deliver a Gresham Lecture, Walking the Line: preserving liberty in times of insecurity. As always, it all seemed eminently logical, sensible and moral - while I was listening. Does a wary hesitation indicate, I wonder, that recent events, rather than piling on of decades, have shifted me from the ideals I once soaked up thirstily from liberal philosphers like Leo Marquard? I couldn't find a transcript of the lecture on the Gresham website but I did get diverted by Vernon Bognador's latest lecture on the Judges and the Constitution, with its references to his Human Rights lecture last year.

Another loop, another detour. And so day by day I get diverted from my search for signs of humanity. Sometimes it's a detour to wrestle with, or clutch to, a liberal argument, but mostly it's the sheer weight of atrocities and dismal news that depresses.

What has made me hit the Create button today is that I've had a couple of really useful prompts/prods/pointers in comments on two posts. As a relatively new blogger, who's not yet ready to share this URL with her friends and colleagues, I am surprised that I get any comments at all. None of my 'frivolous' blogs draws in any comments at all, so I rather imagined this would at first really be just a case of my thinking aloud, communicating with the ether, and maybe using the blog to keep me on track, scanning for sparks of hope.

Of course I want to make ripples, but I thought naively I would have to spread the word about the blog to get any sort of response, and that I imagined would be once I'd written a few posts, gathered some anecdotes and could feel a momentum building.

Yet some posts have raised a comment, and my curiosity about the posters, has taken me to blogs which draw me right in and right away from what should be my spark-seeking priorities. So these detours are a learning experience and that's humbling too.

Also, those comments have been a boost especially as they appear whenever I think this isn't going to work or when I've read something like, yesterday, a review of Left to Tell I tie myself in niggly knots wondering if this "counts" as a spark of humanity shown towards an enemy. This is how ridiculous my side-tracking is: because the man who sheltered the woman was a Hutu priest, "technically" he was their enemy, but as a priest he had his thoughts focused on an altogether different, "spiritual" tribe - ergo, does it count?

How do they find me? Is it a complete chance, i.e. via the random Next Blog button? One early comment was from someone who had apparently read about my site on another website but when I google my own blog, I don't even come across it. So it's puzzling.

I'm starting to think about whether I should try to count "my" hits. Is this natural curiosity? Or just plain vanity?