A song for posterity by Bob Dylan: Forever Young

Nowadays if we actually listen to most songs, we realize that few mean anything. There is often a lack of depth and actual meaning to the words, mostly dwelling upon love, breakups, love and some more breakups.... That is why when I read the lyrics of 'Forever Young' by Bob Dylan I was mesmerized by each beauty of each line. The more I listen to it the more I realized that this song said  everything that I would wish upon my sons but said with such gentleness and sincerity. It encompasses not just good luck and good fortunes but hopes for good judgement, good morals, principles, and good deeds.
It is just the perfect song to dedicated to our children and their children and their children and so on..May God bless them all.

FOREVER YOUNG (Bob Dylan)

May God bless and keep you always,
May your wishes all come true,
May you always do for others
And let others do for you.
May you build a ladder to the stars
And climb on every rung,
May you stay forever young,
Forever young, forever young,
May you stay forever young.

May you grow up to be righteous,
May you grow up to be true,
May you always know the truth
And see the lights surrounding you.
May you always be courageous,
Stand upright and be strong,
May you stay forever young,
Forever young, forever young,
May you stay forever young.

May your hands always be busy,
May your feet always be swift,
May you have a strong foundation
When the winds of changes shift.
May your heart always be joyful,
May your song always be sung,
May you stay forever young,
Forever young, forever young,
May you stay forever young.


Here is a lovely cover of the song by Audra Mae & The Forest Rangers

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Any moral compass for Facebook in this case?

The recent string of headlines, about Facebook and its wavering decision on allowing graphic beheading videos, have been somewhat perturbing. My question : Is there any moral compass influencing these flip flop decisions?

I am starting to think 'No this has nothing to do with moral values and everything to do with Facebook's business savvy and their fear of losing customers'. Here are some of those confusing headlines, now you can decide for yourself.

Facebook U-turn after charities criticise decapitation videos   (BBC World-May 1, 2013)

Facebook has said it will delete videos of people being decapitated which had been spread on its site.

"We will remove instances of these videos that are reported to us while we evaluate our policy and approach to this type of content," it said. (Full story)
Outrage erupts over Facebook's decision on graphic videos  (CNN Money-October 23, 2013)
Facebook has stirred up a storm with a controversial decision to lift a ban on violent videos, including beheadings. A temporary ban on graphic content was imposed in May following complaints about videos which depicted people being decapitated. Facebook removed the reported videos and said it was reviewing its policy on this type of graphic content. Now the company has relaxed its stance. It will allow violent content such as beheadings to be published, provided the intent is to raise awareness rather than celebrate violence. (Full Story)
Facebook removes beheading video, updates violent images standards (NBC News-Oct. 23,2013)

Facebook Inc removed a video of a woman being beheaded from its website on Tuesday and said it would use a broader set of criteria to determine when gory videos are permitted on the site. The move came a day after a public outcry over news reports that Facebook, the world's No. 1 social network with 1.15 billion members, had lifted a temporary ban on images of graphic violence. (Full Story)

Facebook defends allowing beheadings footage to continue (BBC World-November 19, 2013)

Facebook will continue to allow users to show footage of beheadings as long as it is posted in "the right context", MPs have heard. The social network site has been criticised for allowing such images to be shown, amid warnings they could cause psychological damage. Facebook's UK and Ireland policy director Simon Milner said the footage could expose human rights abuses. There would also be "more prior warnings" on content, he added. But the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers (ISBA) accused Facebook of lacking a sense of "responsibility". The US-based company introduced a temporary ban on decapitation clips in May, but announced last month that it believed users should be free to watch them. (Full Story)

What do you think now?

The lines are blurred in far too many ways!!

Wondering what I am talking about, it's sleazy Robin Thicke's summer hit " Blurred Lines". Yes, that supposedly upbeat party song, which was blasted by almost all radio stations all summer long. Everyone seemed to love it, but how many of you actually listened to what was being said in the song? If you did, believe me you probably wouldn't want your sons and daughters listening and singing along to this clearly obscene song. I am saying that because I actually read the lyrics to the whole song.
The reason I did that is I learned to pay attention to lyrics when I became a mom to three boys. I like listening to all kinds of music when driving, I love jamming my favs on the radio when going on long drives. Honestly speaking, I didn't really pay attention to the lyrics of the songs, if they had a fun beat, nice rhythm I'd put it on, without a thought. Then one day I heard my preschooler trying to sing along with Lil Jon's song " Get low", I was mortified!! That was not the kind of song a preschooler should be singing! I started paying attention to the words of the songs , there were far too many channels playing songs with sexually charged lyrics, the more I became conscious of the content of songs the more I was shocked. Hence I decided to listen to NPR or my own selection of music CDs mostly, and only sometimes to songs ( I knew lyrics to) on other radio channels.

So when this summer " Blurred lines" was playing in every possible place, I was very worried to notice that few seemed to even realize how obscene and disturbingly graphic the lyrics were and had lyrics insinuating that aggression and violence go along with consensual sex and relationships. I started asking myself, is our society so immune to such blatant social degradation?

Then today I saw The Guardian news headline "Blurred Lines: the most controversial song of the decade" and as I read on, the news piece was about the song being banned by University College London student union thus joining some 20 other such student bodies in the UK. It also mentions outcry by several US organizations such as Slutwalk about the explicit and violent nature of the song's lyrics. It was a relief to know that others besides myself had issues with this song, others were also worried to see the immunity of the public to songs. There are still people and organizations out there fighting to uphold certain levels of decency, morality and civility. There is hope!

The full article in The Guardian

Blurred Lines: the most controversial song of the decade

The Unsung Virtue of Tolerance ( By E.M Forster)

The following is the speech given by E.M.Forster over radio of British Broadcasting System, July, 1941.
Many of the points he makes are relevant in today's world which is still sadly full of discrimination and persecution based on religion, ethnicity, nationality, and social class.

"EVERYBODY today is talking about reconstruction. Our enemies have their schemes for a new order in Europe, maintained by their secret police, and we on our side talk of rebuilding London or England, or western civilisation, and we make plans how this is to be done—five-year plans, or seven-year, or twenty-year. Which is all very well, but when I hear such talk, and see the architects sharpening their pencils and the contractors getting out their estimates, and the statesmen marking out their spheres of influence, and everyone getting down to the job, as it is called,a very famous text occurs to me: "Except the Lord build the house they labour in vain who build it." Beneath the poetic imagery of these words lies a hard scientific truth, namely, unless you have a sound attitude of mind, a right psychology, you cannot construct or reconstruct anything that will endure. The text is true, not only for religious people, but for workers whatever their outlook, and it is significant that one of our historians, Dr. Arnold Toynbee, should have chosen it to preface his great study of the growth and decay of civilisations.
We shall probably agree on this point; surely the only sound foundation for a civilisation is a sound state of mind. Architects, contractors, international commissioners, marketing boards, broadcasting corporations will never, by themselves, build a new world. They must be inspired by the proper spirit, and there must be the proper spirit in the people for whom they are working. For instance, we shall never have a beautiful new London until people refuse to live in ugly houses. At present, they don't mind; they demand comfort, but are indifferent to civic beauty; indeed they have no taste. I live myself in a hideous block of flats, but I can't say it worries me, and until we are worried, all schemes for reconstructing London beautifully must automatically fail.
But about the general future of civilisation we are all worried. We want to do something about it, and we agree that the basic problem is psychological, that the Lord must build if the work is to stand, that there must be a sound state of mind before diplomacy or economics or trade-conferences can function. What state of mind is sound? Here we may differ. Most people, when asked what spiritual quality is needed to rebuild civilization, will reply "Love". Men must love one another, they say; nations must do likewise, and then the series of cataclysms which is threatening to destroy us will be checked.
Respectfully but firmly, I disagree. Love is a great force in private life; it is indeed the greatest of all things: but love in public affairs simply does not work. It has been tried again and again: by the Christian civilisations of the Middle Ages, and also by the French Revolution, a secular movement which reasserted the Brotherhood of Man. And it has always failed. The idea that nations should love one another, or that business concerns or marketing boards should love one another, or that a man in Portugal, say, should love a man in Peru of whom he has never heard—it is absurd, it is unreal, worse, it is dangerous. It leads us into perilous and vague sentimentalism. "Love is what is needed," we chant, and then sit back and the world goes on as before. The fact is we can only love what we know personally. And we cannot know much. In public affairs, in the rebuilding of civilisation, something much less dramatic and emotional is needed, namely, tolerance. Tolerance is a very dull virtue. It is boring. Unlike love, it has always had a bad press. It is negative. It merely means putting up with people, being able to stand things. No one has ever written an ode to tolerance, or raised a statue to her. Yet this is the quality which will be most needed after the war. This is the sound state of mind which we are looking for. This is the only force which will enable different races and classes and interests to settle down together to the work of reconstruction.
The world is very full of people—appallingly full; it has never been so full before—and they are all tumbling over each other. Most of these people one doesn't know and some of them one doesn't like; doesn't like the colour of their skins, say, or the shapes of their noses, or the way they blow them or don't blow them, or the way they talk, or their smell or their clothes, or their fondness for jazz or their dislike of jazz, and so on. Well, what is one to do? There are two solutions. One of them is the Nazi solution. If you don't like people, kill them, banish them, segregate them, and then strut up and down proclaiming that you are the salt of the earth. The other way is much less thrilling, but it is on the whole the way of the democracies, and I prefer it. If you don't like people, put up with them as well as you can. Don't try to love them; you can't, you'll only strain yourself. But try to tolerate them. On the basis of that tolerance a civilised future may be built. Certainly I can see no other foundation for the post-war world.
For what it will most need is the negative virtues: not being huffy, touchy, irritable, revengeful. I have no more faith in positive militant ideals; they can so seldom be carried out without thousands of human beings getting maimed or imprisoned. Phrases like "I will purge this nation," "I will clean up this city," terrify and disgust me. They might not have mattered so much when the world was emptier: they are horrifying now, when one nation is mixed up with another, when one city cannot be organically separated from its neighbours. And, another point: reconstruction is unlikely to be rapid. I do not believe that we are psychologically fit for it, plan the architects never so wisely. In the long run, yes, perhaps: the history of our race justifies that hope. But civilisation has its mysterious regressions, and it seems to me that we are fated now to be in one of them, and must recognise this and behave accordingly. Tolerance, I believe, will be imperative after the establishment of peace. It's always useful to take a concrete instance: and I have been asking myself how I should behave if, after peace was signed, I met Germans who had been fighting against us. I shouldn't try to love them: I shouldn't feel inclined. They have broken a window in my little ugly flat for one thing, and they have done other things which I need not specify. But I shall try to tolerate them, because it is common-sense, because in the post-war world we shall have to live with Germans. We can't exterminate them, any more than they have succeeded in exterminating the Jews. We shall have to put up with them, not for any lofty reason, but because it is the next thing that will have to be done.
I don't then regard Tolerance as a great eternally established divine principle, though I might perhaps quote "In My Father's House are many mansions" in support of such a view. It is just a makeshift, suitable for an overcrowded and overheated planet. It carries on when love gives out, and love generally gives out as soon as we move away from our home and our friends—and stand in a queue for potatoes. Tolerance is wanted in the queue; otherwise we think, "Why will people be so slow?"; it is wanted in the tube, "Why will people be so fat?"; it is wanted at the telephone, or we say "Why are they so deaf?" or conversely, "Why do they mumble?" It is wanted in the street, in the office, at the factory, and it is wanted above all between classes, races, and nations. It's dull. And yet it entails imagination. For you have all the time to be putting yourself in someone else's place. Which is a desirable spiritual exercise.
I was saying that Tolerance has a bad press. This ceaseless effort to put up with other people seems tame, almost ignoble, so that it sometimes repels generous natures, and I don't recall many great men who have recommended it. St. Paul certainly didn't. Nor did Dante. However, a few names occur to me, and I will give them, to lend some authority to what I say. Going back over two thousand years, and to India, there is the great Buddhist Emperor Asoka, who set up inscriptions all over India, recording not his own exploits but the need for mercy and mutual understanding and peace. Going back about four hundred years, to Holland, there is the Dutch scholar Erasmus, who stood apart from the religious fanaticism of the Reformation and was abused by both parties, Catholic and Lutheran, in consequence. In the same century there was the Frenchman, Montaigne, subtle, intelligent, witty, who lived in his quiet country house and wrote essays which still delight the civilised. And England, too: there was John Locke, the philosopher; there was Sydney Smith, the Liberal and liberalising divine; there was a man who recently died, Lowes Dickinson, writer of a little book called A Modern Symposium, which might be called the Bible of Tolerance. And Germany, too—yes, Germany:
there was Goethe. All these men testify to the creed which I have been trying to express: a negative creed, but very necessary for the salvation of this crowded jostling modern world.
Two more remarks, and I have done. The first is that it's very easy to see fanaticism in other people, but difficult to spot in oneself. Take the evil of racial prejudice. We can easily detect it in the Nazis; their conduct has been infamous ever since they rose to power. But we ourselves—are we quite guiltless? We are far less guilty than they are? Yet is there no racial prejudice in the British Empire? Is there
no colour question? I ask you to consider that, those of you to whom Tolerance is more than a pious word. My other remark is to forestall a criticism. Tolerance is not the same as weakness. Putting up with people does not mean giving in to them. This complicates the problem. But the rebuilding of civilisation is bound to be complicated. I only feel certain that unless the Lord builds the House, they will labour in vain who build it. Perhaps, when the house is completed, love will enter it, and the greatest force in our private lives will also rule in public life."


By E. M. FORSTER, English Journalist and Commentator,
Delivered over radio of British Broadcasting System, July, 1941
Vital Speeches of the Day, Vol. VIII, pp. 12-14

Oranges and Sunshine

Last week saw " Oranges and Sunshine" a movie by Jim Loach based on a book 'Empty Cradles' by Margaret Humphreys. The movie and the subject are both so poignant that I wanted to share it with my friends.

Starring Emma Watson , as  Margaret Humphreys a real life social worker who in the 1980s uncovered the scandalous and forced relocation of poor British children (on welfare) to Australia. As usual Emma Watson gives an impeccable performance.
Hugo Weaving and David Wenham also give powerful performances as Jack and Len as two former British Child migrants who are tormented by their painful past. The movie is slow paced and leaves one deeply disturbed by this blatant miscarriage of justice and cruelty to children but I would still recommend it!

Facts about British Forced Child Migration:

It has since been established that such forced migrations of poor children were made not only to Australia. The origins of the scheme go back to 1618 when a hundred children were sent from London to Richmond, Virginia which is now one of the United States of America. The final party arrived in Australia in 1970. It is estimated that child migration programmes were responsible for the removal of over 130,000 children from the United Kingdom to Canada, New Zealand, Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) and Australia. About 7000 of these children were sent to Australia.
In most cases children were told their parents had died or didn't want them back, while parents were told their kids had been adopted by wealthier people. These children were placed in Roman Catholic Institutions in Western Australia and Queensland, where they were housed and allegedly abused. The children were promised a life full of Sunshine and Oranges, hence the name of the movie.

Britain is the only country in the world with a sustained history of child migration. Only Britain has used child migration as a significant part of its child care strategy over a period of four centuries rather than as a policy of last resort during times of war or civil unrest.This is a shameful chapter in British history, the govt of Britain and Australia initially refused to acknowledge it. Prime Ministers Kevin Rudd and Gordon Brown finally made public apologies in 2009 and 2010 respectively.

Margaret Humphreys to this day is working through the Child Migrants Trust to join these children and their families to their relatives and families in Britain.