Today, more so than any other, I feel guilty for having good food to eat, a warm cozy home and the time and freedom to pursue intellectual interests. I can't help thinking about conditions in many other parts of the world. As I eat my boiled egg from a free-ranging chicken, porridge from good old Quaker oats grown here in Canada, toast from homemade bread, spread with REAL butter and apricot jam made from trees in my yard, I can't help thinking about the people in Afghanistan, and Chechnya, and Palestine, and Zimbabwe and increasingly elsewhere all over the world.

What have they done to deserve being deprived of the enjoyment of life? Why are they being destroyed by or without intervention from the have-nations? The only way I can justify living such a good life is to do what I can to tell people about the bad life.

My hope is that some day the millions of free-world taxpayers who allow this to go on by not holding any of our governments accountable, will wake up and demand a stop to war - or at least a moratorium - until nations start living by the rules of existing law. "The proles, if only they could somehow become consicous of their own strength... needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies" said Orwell, and "sooner or later it must occur to them to do it."

This past October was the 40th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Much has been written, and a movie has been made, about the test JFK was put to, by his Maker, and how he passed with flying colours. He did absolutely everything right, and he learned alot which would have guided him in future years, and set policy for future generations, had he been allowed to live.

But, as we all know, he was NOT allowed to live. His type of leadership is a threat to those who like to make war, and so they killed him. "Those that will not break, it kills", said Hemingway about the world.

In reading some coverage of the Cuban Missile Crisis recently I was struck by a comment made by Khrushchev among the letters he and JFK were sending back and forth. It is referred to as the "knot letter" and is part of the archives available for public viewing at the JFK Library. Khrushchev is finally backing down - agreeing to withdraw the missiles from Cuba. In the letter he tells JFK that "if the two sides keep pulling on the 'knot of war', it would be pulled so tight only war could break it."

To me, Khrushchev expressed perfectly what the world is up against today. The difference between now and the Cuban Missile Crisis is that several tugs-of-war are going on simultaneously, and there's no voice of reason trying to break it up peacefully. ~ Jackie Jura

PICADILLY PEACE STATUE