Qohel

Make a Difference

Day: July 20, 2009

You Don’t Have A Problem With God, Do You?

July 20, 2009 / / 0 Comments

It is worth the wait through the annoying ads (and the slow download speed) for this interview between a swish CNN interviewer and a rural US car dealer.

Free AK47 with every truck.

Mr Muller, the dealer, is asked whether giving away AK47s is irresponsible. He talks about a family recently murdered by home invaders.

The interviewer talks about growing up as a teenager in rural America. Mr Muller points out that things have changed in the last 30 years (ouch) and his county has a major problem with meth addicts.

She asks why people cannot just rely on the police. He says the police are great, but the response time to his home is 15 minutes. His family could be dead by the time they got there.

She asks why Mr Muller mentions God in his company motto, and asks whether Jesus would wear a gun. He points out they didn’t have guns then.

The whole interview is brilliant. A clash of cleverness with common sense.

I cannot help wonder whether things might have turned out differently for this Australian family, three adults and two children, bludgeoned to death in their home yesterday, if they had been customers of Mr Muller.

Child Labour

July 20, 2009 / / 0 Comments

Just got back from Adelaide where Kathy and I visited my sister Amanda in hospital.

On every second bus shelter there seemed to be a poster exhorting us to put an end to child labour. It had a picture of a (black) child in a museum type enclosure, sorting some kind of grain. Children working for pay, it seemd to be saying, should be a thing of the past, remembered with horror, like the use of child miners and chimney sweeps in Britain two centuries ago.

The child was a model, of course. Real starving children don’t hang about in plastic boxes in museums.

But doesn’t that mean the child was being paid for work?

I agree children shouldn’t have to work in order to provide for themselves the basic necessities of life – food, clothing, basic education and medical care.

Although that view is probably a fairly recent one. Until a few centuries ago it was simply taken for granted that most children would contribute to family income as soon as they were able to do so – working in field, home or factory.

Sticking up posters on bus shelters in Adelaide is not going to make any contribution to the structural economic changes which will make it uneccessary for children to work to gain the basic necessities of life.

Supporting business, trade, industry and resource development will, because these things build the real wealth which enables families to free children for education and leisure.

© 2024 Qohel