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Perseverance can be fatal
There’s a lot of talk about perseverance these days. How it maketh the man and what a supreme virtue it is. Like our beleaguered Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, I come from a Presbyterian background where perseverance is everything. Parents stay together and work at their misery. The phrase try, try and try again is employed when any failure may occur, no matter how ludicrous the challenge or futile the effort. Admitting defeat is anathema. The only acceptable excuse for failure is death through blind devotion and overwork.
There was a time in my life where I ticked just about all the boxes of Calvinist indoctrination (except the actual religion); a time when I came dangerously close to paying the ultimate price of blind perseverance. I knew I should have admitted defeat but years of diligent programming told me it was unthinkable, fate would decide my future.
In the end an escape committee of friends, intuition and luck came together and sprang me from the dour and endless maze of work and guilt. People who know me in the post-perseverance age still think of me as a workaholic. But I’m recovering and a million times happier to have stared Presbyterianism in its awful dead eyes and won.
Knowing when to fight and when to retire gracefully is the hardest but best lesson that life has ever taught me.
Number 1 Terrorist
It was fantastic to watch the inauguration this week, hearing the leavened President Obama being so publicly scathing about George Bush and his legacy. I know everybody talks about how impossible the task ahead for Obama is, and how he can’t live up to expectations, but it would be hard to imagine that he won’t make a vast improvement on the mess that Bush has left behind.
This image is from the Stop the War march in London in 2006, protesting against the bombing of southern Lebanon.
On a related topic, I’ve just heard the news that the BBC has refused to broadcast the Disaster Emergency Committee’s appeal for Gaza, on the grounds that it will jeopardise their impartiality. What has got into them? They’ve broadcast previous appeals for peoples around the world that have been devastated by military action. Why is this different?
Donate to the DEC Gaza appeal.
Washington DC, 2002
In the week of the historic inauguration of President Elect Barack Obama, I can’t help but feel a little nervous. It is such an enormous responsibility to take on the mess left by the dreadful Bush; he carries so much weight on his shoulders. I thought this picture was somewhat apt.
