She Needs Help

*



Sydney Harbour.

"One day, people will look back at this moment in history and say: 'Thank God there were courageous people willing to serve, because they laid the foundations for peace for generations to come. I hope their families know that citizens pray for their comfort and strength, whether they were the first one who lost their life in Iraq or recently lost their lives in Iraq. I've vowed in the past, and I will vow so long as I'm president, to make sure that those lives were not lost in vain."
President George Bush, as toll of US soldiers passes 4,000.

"It is a sober moment. The president feels each and every one of the deaths very strongly, and he grieves for their families."
General David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq.


The whole of life in single moment, a gesture, freeze framed and played time and time again. What's wrong with that woman, my daughter asks as one of the local denizens dashes about desperately one morning. Mental health and substance abuse problems, I say dismissively, waving away a no doubt complex set of circumstances that has led this woman here. Wild eyed, she dashes past us, looking down an alley, then dashes past us again, back up to the main street. Unusually, she has blond hair despite her dark skin.

"Have you seen a tall bloke with a beard," she asks us frantically as she dashes past us once again, making a false start to run down the alley and then turning back.
"No," I say, steering my daughter away.
There are too many crazies, they are too unpredictable.
"How did they get like that?" my daughter Henrietta persists.
"It's the Ice," I say. "It's driving them all crazy. In the old days it was just heroin and they were just nodding off and stealing videos. Now they've all gone crazy. You see it around where I work all the time, it's the Ice."

She grunts to herself; suggesting that she doesn't want to be like that and doesn't understand why anyone would want to be like that.

"If you sent them to hospital would they become normal?" she asks, persisting in a line of questioning when I would rather pretend the world was roses and nothing like this ever happened in our neighbourhood, had ever touched our lives.

"Yes," I say. "It's quite amazing actually. You straighten these people out, send them away for a few months of treatment and away from everything, and they become perfectly normal people, well pretty normal anyway. Some of them can be amazingly intelligent, nice people, away from the drugs."

"Don't they realise what's going to happen?" she asks as we leave the scene behind us. I can see her up in the main street, talking to some other woman. "Have you seen...?" I hear her ask. "Nah," comes the response. Then she spots someone in the distance and dashes past us for the last time, disappearing down the street towards the Settlement, as the housing project is known.

I feel a vague sense of relief that her suffering is over, that the dealer has finally shown up.

My daughter shakes her head. "I don't ever want to be like that," she says.
"You don't have to be," I reply. "And I don't think you will be either, you're too ambitious."

She laughs in a teenage girl kind of way, the incident over. It's a standing joke between us; just how ambitious she is. All the girls are the same these days, they want to be rich, famous, fabulous, and they don't seem to care much how they get there, all prepared to work their butts off to get there.

"My only concern is that she still thinks the world works, when it clearly doesn't," I say to another woman about a particular person. "She thinks if you work hard and keep everything together then the universe will reward you. The big house, the income, the career success. But it doesn't work like that. Lots of people are busting their guts and getting nowhere. Look at this court, it's a mess."
She agrees.
"Oh you're right, it really doesn't work. Not anymore. Look at the queues of traffic every one's sitting in every morning. Look at the number of house repossessions."
And I think: that's exactly right, nothing does work anymore. People sit round on the doll and live better lives than the ones who are getting up and going to work. Here I have passed on the message to my own offspring: work hard, do the right thing, keep your nose clean, everything will come good.
But that isn't true, not by a long shot, certainly not for everybody.
But like every parent I want the world to work: at least for my own offspring. Let one and one make two. Let decency and common sense rule. Let hard work be rewarded and a healthy lifestyle pay dividends.
And by every measure possible: don't let them become like the people by which we're surrounded, wild eyed, drug addicted, dashing hither and thither looking for relief. Let the world stay in place, let noble goals be accepted, let a smile and a kind gesture, a frozen moment when the good are rewarded, be the way things are.

THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.thewest.com.au/aapstory.aspx?StoryName=470575

Rudd heads off on major overseas tour
26th March 2008, 22:07 WST
AAP

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd heads off on Thursday on a marathon five-country tour aimed at gaining a first-hand understanding of the global credit crisis and repositioning Australia on the world stage.

Over the next 18 days, Mr Rudd will travel around 45,000 kilometres as he visits Washington, New York, London, Beijing, Brussels, Bucharest and southern China on his first major overseas trip outside the Asia Pacific since becoming prime minister.

His first stop is Washington, where he will be hosted at the White House by US President George W Bush.

It will be their first face to face meeting since Mr Bush's pal and Mr Rudd's predecessor, John Howard, was ousted from government last November.

And it will be the first opportunity for the pair to discuss Labor's decision to withdraw combat troops from Iraq.

With US presidential elections in November, Mr Rudd is tipped to meet Democratic contenders Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton, who got the nod from the Labor leader when pressed on Rove McManus's comedy program during the election campaign.

Climate change, Afghanistan and the stalled Doha world trade talks will be some of the major items up for discussion as Mr Rudd works his way through a packed Washington schedule.

The prime minister signalled one of his key priorities in Washington and elsewhere will be to gain a better understanding of what's being done to address the global credit crunch by speaking to influential players such as US Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke.

In a speech last night to the Australian National University East Asia Forum, Mr Rudd said he had a responsibility to try to influence international decision makers as the government tried to cushion the economy from possible turbulence.

"Decisions taken in these capitals will directly shape the global financial environment and impact on Australia's economic future," he said.

His important foray on the international stage comes as Mr Rudd seeks to position Australia as an "activist" middle power in world affairs, a marked change of strategy from the Howard government.

"The truth is that Australia's voice has been too quiet for too long across the various councils of the world," Mr Rudd said.

"That is why during the course of the next three years, the world will see an increasingly activist Australian international policy in areas where we believe we may be able to make a positive difference."

He singled out climate change, the Millennium Development goals and nuclear weapons proliferation as some of the issues on which Australia could work more closely with the United Nations.

Mr Rudd will make a whistle-stop visit to New York to meet UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, a heavily symbolic gesture following the Howard government's difficult relationship with the multilateral forum.

He departs the US on Tuesday for Europe.


Sydney Harbour.