JANUARY 23RD, 2010
By F. DAVID PEAT
Some Gentle Actions make a major change in society, others can be a simple act of kindness that can end up having an effect on a person’s life. I recently had an email from someone in Australia who would like to remain anonymous. She lives is a village outside Port Macquarie in New South Wales. It is a holiday spot with beautiful beaches and tourist attractions but also an area of many retired people. The only disadvantage is a poor bus service, with only four buses per day. Our correspondent has therefore made it a practice of stopping her can at these bus stops and offering to give elderly people a lift into town and drop them where they need to go. She is now planning to put up a notice in the local bakery offering a service to elderly and disabled people who need to got into town.
JANUARY 23RD, 2010
By F. DAVID PEAT
Simone Caramel has sent an example of transformative action in Argentina. Caminito (little path) was an area of Buenos Aires occupied mainly by European immigrants, many of them Italian, in the early decades of the Twentieth Century. It was also the place where the Tango was born. (Caminito Tango was composed in 1924.
But as the immigrant’s income improved they moved to other parts of Buenos Aires and the area became abandoned and was soon filled with crime. Then in the late fifties an artist, Benito Quinquela Martin, had the idea of painting the fronts of the houses in bright pastel colours. The effect was to revive the area. Bars, gift shops and restaurants opened and soon the area becama a mecca for tourists and today is very a lively area.
JANUARY 23RD, 2010
By F. DAVID PEAT
Al Boag has sent his own reflections on society and what can emerge out of a moment of “creative suspension”. Back in 1980 Boag was half way through a doctoral program in Scotland when, while riding his bicycle to the university, he had a critical moment where everything stopped and his thinking changed in a radical way, causing him to abandon his thesis. One image that came to him was the idea of life in the womb, where biology provides everything to the developing baby. He related this to the utopian notion that the state should provide food, shelter and clothing as a citizen’s basic right. A Guaranteed Minimum Income would provide the security out of which a citizen could then find a way to contribute back to society. When Boag returned to Australia he went on unemployment benefits and retrained himself. The result was that he began to build frame houses. Today five houses have been provided for himself and others with a market value of $1.5 million. This, in Boag’s estimation, is a five-fold return on what the Australian government had invested in his unemployment benefits. Over the past twenty years Boag has been writing to politicians, social reformers, and policy theorists arguing that the provision of food, shelter, and clothing should be enshrined as basic rights.
