08/09/2015
""There’s this song by Crowded House, ‘Don’t Dream It’s Over’, that I have loved and loved for nearly thirty (THIRTY!) years now. And this week, its lyrics have been going round and round in my head relentlessly, especially the following bit: ‘In the paper today / Tales of war and of waste / But you turn right over to the T.V. page.’ Those words have been admonishing me in my head, as I have done just that: averted my eyes from a photograph of a small boy only a little younger than my own and looked frantically for a photo of some embarrassing celebrity doing something ridiculous or amusing. So I’m not immune to the charms of the sidebar of shame, and I absolutely understand why if it did not exist it would be necessary to invent it.
But I think there comes a point where we cannot collectively keep averting our eyes; when it is no longer acceptable to peddle those well-worn platitudes of ‘charity begins at home’ ‘we have food banks here though’ ‘we’re already full up’ and return to our daily existence as if nothing has happened or if it has, it doesn’t affect us. I think many more people are coming to realise that yes, it does affect all of us, and we all have responsibility for each other. If we cannot rely on our governments to be our moral compass, then it is up to us individually and collectively to behave honourably and with kindness.
The cold hard truth is that Aylan Kurdi is not the first child to have drowned during this unprecedented displacement of humans around the globe; the heartbreaking reality is that he will not be the last either. That it has come to this for people around the world to realise that this crisis is not about benefits scrounging and infiltration by terrorists is throughly depressing.
Anyway, a few weeks ago I was thinking about all these things on my way to an airport, and on the roadside I saw that Beatles lyric scrawled on a wall. ‘The love you take is equal to the love you make.’
Sometimes it’s hard to be open and fearlessly loving; the worry is that you will be taken advantage of. But in a world that is so bleak at times, what does it hurt to be kind? And kind to strangers?
At some point, we are all strangers to someone. And we rely on that kernel of goodness inside of others to catch us should we fall. Anything that can happen, can happen to any one of us."
'The Road’ is a song about self-determination and I did not write it with the topic of immigration in mind. When Director Damian Weilers came to me with the ...
