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14th
August 2010
Incredibly
Irrational
War.
All-out war.
Brothers and sisters, people of the same
race and creed fighting and hating each
other, doing all they can to pull each
other down, to destroy each other.
Why?
For those of you who have never read the
story, the above was a description of
a situation that existed in a tale by
Jonathan Swift entitled “Gulliver’s
Travels”.
In the fable, Gulliver experiences a shipwreck
and is washed up on the shores of Lilliput,
a land where the inhabitants are only
about six inches tall. He is befriended
by the Lilliputians and eventually gets
involved in a war between them and their
neighbours, whose kingdom is called Blefuscu.
An all-out war.
This is where the story enters the realm
of the ridiculous: the reason why the
Lilliputians and the Blefuscudians are
bent on destroying each other, stems from
a difference of opinion about whether,
when having a soft-boiled egg for breakfast,
it should be eaten from the pointed or
the rounded end. That’s it …
end of story. These tiny people, of the
same size, race and fraternal in every
respect, are blindly determined to fight
each other to the death over an issue
as trivial as which end of an egg should
be cracked open at breakfast.
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How
incredibly irrational! How could brothers fight
each other over something so nonsensical, destroying
the region they inhabit, rather than working
together to secure a better life for themselves
and their families? Their minds are obviously
as small as their diminutive bodies.
But, dear reader, would it have made any more
sense if the Lilliputians and Blefuscudians
had carried out their bitter war because one
side wore red T-shirts and the other side yellow?
Would you consider any band of brothers who
did, to be as imbecilic as those tiny-brained
people? If they took sides and openly hated
each other and sought to destroy each other
because the king on the yellow side wished that
the ruler of the red side and all his followers
be ground into the dust … and vice versa?
Need we say more, except that, unless we cease,
in this country, to wage war against each other
because of party politics – exemplified
by the colour of the shirt one wears –
we are admitting that, in reality, our brains
are no bigger than those of the people Gulliver
encountered in his travels.
It is time to stop the senselessness.
Discuss
Story
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