Three boys aged between 5 and 8 are skate boarding along the verandahs of a newly built house, yet to be lived in.
They whizz up and down off the verandah, hop onto the driveway, scoot across the road and up the opposite house's driveway.
"Watch this!" they scream.
"So. Why aren't you at school?"It is a Monday morning.
"Cors, we are si.....Well, I don't live here ...and they..," Waving a lazy arm in the direction of his playmates,"
They....."he trails off as one of the others shouts;
"Watch ME!"It is a moot point whether or not it is any of my business.
It is a moot point whether asking the question means I am being 'part of a village' that raises a child. It is a moot point whether or not it is a sense of 'community' that brings me to speak out loud to children I have never seen before.
To them, it is a moot point whether or not I am a kidnapper, a child molester or a concerned woman of a certain age.
In actual fact, I believe in education. Education brings thinking, knowledge, joy and a future.
"One in Ten teenagers binge drink." The report this morning bellowed from the news.
"Is that all?"It is a moot point because through our knowledge over the past 15 years we have seen it on a regular level here, in this village, where there is nothing much for teenagers to do.
What to do about it?
It is a moot point whether it has been ever thus.
My uncle, now dead, said he spent his years from 13 to 19 being nothing short of a 'delinquent' (around 1938 onward), and that was before the term was formulated by the popular press.
The stories coming from my ancestry search are thick and fast of days of yore when in the 1800's so many were having affairs, children out of wedlock, stealing, fleeing the law, abandoning children, leaving babies on doorsteps, handing them over to 'welfare', drinking all the family's money, dying of alcoholism (including the women), being 'kicked in the head by a horse'..and many other tales of wonder and horror.
So when was this day, this time of '
good Christian folk', who behaved with absolute decorum, with moral integrity, with high born ethics? Which one of them didn't castigate the unwed mother, the aborigines whose land they stole and profited on? Where are these good '
white' folk from
'good British stock' who treated everyone fairly, with Christ-like consideration, with charity and generosity?
The secrets and lies are all a moot point.
The truth is moot.
It is lost now, through cover-ups, pretense, fakery and false modesty.
"Men," they are now reporting,
"Men who are in a stable relationship, a loving relationship, but who do not want to have babies, are egotistical immature control freaks. They want to keep the woman for herself, for her to 'look after' him and to do what he wants and not be diverted by a irritation such as a child."It is a moot point, but one, now I have heard it I can read into the younger men I have spoken with over the past 6 years. I recognise it in their character, their behaviour toward their loved one.
It is a moot point, but one that should be raised consciously so the men can examine their own reasons. No longer:
"
Oh my career, blah blah blah blah. Oh plenty of time, blah blah. Oh I don't want the responsibility, blah blah blah. Oh it costs too much...blah friggin' blah".
It is a moot point but in this era of selfish consideration, self righteous grasping, egotistical maniacalism, it should be mooted to the moon and back!
So in a world of how it
'should be' or
'how it used to be' here is a representation of one who '
married too young' ( CRAP!), who was one of the first to witness his first born's birth, and who snuck a polaroid camera into the maternity ward in 1977 to snap a photo of his much awaited, much desired and much painfully arrived at son.
It is a moot point which moot points should be mooted.
Everything should be on the table, regularly re-examined, and tested, for the good of
man-kind!
(OR you are looking after your daughters cat.)
