08/03/2013

The Inklings: Chapter 39

By Anna

To read the story from the beginning go here.

When Syafika woke up on Christmas morning she could feel the heat of the sun coming through the closed blinds and wasn’t sure if it was because she’d slept in or because it was going to be a very hot day. It was actually both.

“Its 10am on Christmas morning” realized Syafika when she turned over and looked at her clock. “Will Vincent come for Christmas lunch?” she wondered. Before their fight Vincent and Syafika had agreed that he would come to her place for Christmas and that she would go to his parent’s place on Boxing Day. Perhaps that firm agreement would be enough of an excuse for Vincent to end his display of anger. Syafika felt hopeful but didn’t want to feel that way. She preferred to be pleasantly surprised than disappointed.

The thing that was actually making Syafika most anxious about whether Vincent came to lunch or not was that she hadn’t told her parents about their fight, and so she hadn’t warned them that Vincent might not come for Christmas lunch. If Vincent didn’t turn up Syafika’s parents would not only be disappointed, but Syafika would have to put up with them demanding to know why he didn’t come. Syafika hadn’t envisaged her first romance ending with her being dumped. When Syafika’s daydream romances did end it involved her making a passionate break-up speech about how incredibly unfairly she’d been treated.

Syafika put on a nicer outfit than she would have chosen if she was sure that she’d only be spending the day with her family, and then she went to see what her parents were up to.

Rose and Festus had actually been up to a lot. Preparations for Christmas lunch were well underway. Festus had moved the barbeque to the shady driveway and was lighting it, Syafika could smell something roasting in the oven and Rose was making three types of salad. “Three types of salad, at once!” thought Syafika and wondered how it was that her mother managed to always do such a nice Christmas lunch when on other days she usually had trouble boiling eggs or making toast.

The dining table had been decorated with vases of red bougainvillea flowers and set with the best cutlery, plates and glasses. Syafika was imagining who would sit where when she realized that there were only five places laid.

“Mum, why are only five places laid at the table?” Syafika asked.

“Vincent called this morning and said he wouldn’t be coming” answered Rose.

Syafika’s face became very hot with embarrassment. She also felt intense disappointment and realized that she had expected Vincent to come. As the shock subsided Syafika began to feel angry that Vincent and her mother had conspired and made her look like a fool.

Syafika marched into the back garden and sat down to stew, but didn’t stay long because it was very hot and she was very hungry. She sheepishly went back into the kitchen to make some tea, but avoided making eye contact with her mother. Syafika didn’t offer her mother a cup of tea either, although she knew Rose would be dying for one.

While the tea was drawing Syafika opened the packed-full fridge and poked around, looking for something tasty for breakfast that wouldn’t ruin her appetite for lunch.

“Careful!” complained Festus when he came inside and saw Syafika investigating the precariously positioned stacks of food in the fridge. He’d spent quite a bit of time the night before getting everything to fit.

“How can the fridge be so full and not have something good for breakfast in it?” Syafika complained back.

“Have cereal like you have everyday” suggested Rose.

“You can’t have cereal for breakfast on Christmas Day!” said Syafika and she scanned the fridge shelves once more before slowly closing the door.

Syafika took a handful of salted nuts from a bowl on the dining table, and went back to the back yard, slopping some tea on the floor on the way.

“It’s going to be a crap day” Syafika said to herself as she sat down on the very hot iron bench. She slumped and chewed with her mouth open. She didn’t care if she wasn’t being elegant. She thought she may as well be a grumpy slob because nobody loved her even when she tried her best to be lovely. Then Syafika remembered the delicious lunch her parents were making and couldn’t help feeling a bit more positive. “I may as well try to enjoy the one day of the year that Mum makes an effort in the kitchen” thought Syafika.

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28/12/2012

The Inklings: Chapter 38

By Anna

John was feeling lonely and a bit anxious without D’arby, but tried to make the most of having the flat to himself, starting with a spring clean. John removed every trace of mould from the bathroom then every trace of dust from the rest of the flat. He even wiped the picture rails and skirting boards. When John had finished cleaning the oven he emptied out all of the drawers and cupboards, wiped them all clean and put everything back tidily. It wasn’t until John was bringing in the freshly washed curtains off the line that he thought about doing some ironing.

John hadn’t always liked ironing, and for most of his adult life he hadn’t bothered with it, but he did like the way that properly ironed clothes looked so neat and tidy. Doing the ironing also helped John to feel calm. However, John knew that if he did some ironing in D’arby’s flat he wouldn’t be able to enjoy it because he’d feel guilty and imagine that D’arby would know what he was up to. So John put his crinkly clothes into the bag on his two-wheel shopping trolley and walked to Fanta’s house. It didn’t matter that she wasn’t there – John now had his own key.

When Fanta arrived home she found that John had the ironing board out in the lounge room and was singing to himself as he pressed the button on the iron to squirt steam onto a pair of jeans.

“What’s wrong?” asked Fanta, without really knowing why she said it.

John looked confused at first, as if he didn’t know why Fanta would ask such a question but then he thought again, put down the iron, sat down on the sofa and put his head in his hands.

“Tomorrow is Christmas!” said John in a terrified voice. Then he added “And I have to spend it with my family!”

Fanta couldn’t help laughing.

“It isn’t funny!” said John, although he couldn’t help having a short giggle at himself before adding “Your family loves you but mine hates me and I don’t know if anything I can do can make up for all the awful things I’ve done in the past.”

“They don’t hate you” said Fanta. “They just want you to have a good life. I’m sure they can’t wait to see you.”

John felt much better after hearing that and decided he didn’t need to finish his ironing. He squashed the jeans he had been ironing back into the bag on his shopping trolley and unplugged the iron.

“What are you doing?” John asked Fanta as she turned her computer on.

“I need to print out a letter that was emailed to my Uncle. It is a Christmas present for Syafika’s cousin Ousman.” answered Fanta.

John watched Fanta open up a file containing a scan of a hand written letter. He then averted his eyes because he thought it would be rude to read it and waited as Fanta printed it out, folded the letter up and put it in a red envelope. She wrote “Ousman” on the envelope and then tied a piece of gold ribbon around it.

“Let’s walk to Syafika’s place now and put it under their Christmas tree” said Fanta.

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03/12/2012

Not alone

By Anna

By The Inkling

Dear readers,

You may have been disappointed recently by the long time between posts on this blog and I am sorry for that. There has been so much on my plate and on my mind that I have been overwhelmed, but now I am going to try to delight you with a post that covers everything!

There has been lots of bleak news lately and I have found myself sitting at home, despairing and getting angry with all the stupid people out there who aren’t doing anything to save the world. This made me feel very lonely, until I started thinking things through calmly.

When I was a child I remember that I counted a couple of trees near the house as friends. They were Cypress Pines and were easy to climb, but I usually just sat on one of the lower branches. I felt, or just imagined, that I was communicating with the tree as I sat there. I visualized or sensed the life in the tree. Perhaps I was just imagining the sap flowing below the bark, but this calmed me and I felt like we understood each other. By the time I was a teenager both of these trees had been chopped down because it was a bushfire hazard to have such flammable trees so close to the house (so even people who truly love the bush cannot live in it without the bush being worse off), but I still remember the comforting feeling of having something in common with a tree. I could be alone in the bush and never feel lonely.

I have never been someone who was flowing down the mainstream, but I cannot believe that I am so unique that nobody else out there is being scared almost to death by the recent reports on how climate change is already getting out of hand or that nobody else frantically reads through articles, books and blogs looking for answers or stays awake at night trying to find a solution. Even if I were conceited enough to believe that only one in a million people cares as much as I do then, in the seven billion people out there, there must be at least another 7000 who care as much as me. I am not alone, and nor can I be all that rare.

What if some of those people out there who I have been getting angry with for letting the planet be destroyed are also sitting at home despairing and including me in their “stupid people” and wondering why I am not out there saving the planet?

Yes! It is not just me who talks about how ridiculous it is that we are cutting down nature reserves and dredging the Great Barrier Reef so we can export even more coal when coal is already doing a good job of killing the planet. It is not just me who cheers when GDP is down because we know that when the economy is growing our environmental impacts are too. It is not just me who would prefer it if our city/town/country didn’t become busier.

And yet the focus is still on keeping the economy growing, more mines are being approved, governments have no plans for sustainability and nobody in power is racing to stop climate change. People who do care about the future are being kept busy putting out spot fires – saving one piece of forest or coast or farm takes a lot of work and there will always be pressure on these areas if the economy must keep growing. Even creating a new reserve or national park does not mean we have more natural landscape than before, it just means that one piece of what we already had is less accessible to people looking for profits.

I may not be alone, but is it possible that in the midst of all this craziness that the majority of people would prefer the planet not be destroyed? What if it is just that our democracy is not working? In a true democracy how could 1% (or 0.1%) be doing what they like at the expense of everyone else?

And now we see that climate change means that our alternatives are no future or, despite our best possible efforts, a planet that is much less habitable than we were expecting, but I’m trying to get over being scared. Life is relentless. There will always be problems and, to some degree, people are good at adapting. It is scary to think of the radical change necessary to have even just a chance of a livable planet, but imagine how delicious it would be to be one of the people who was putting the brakes on and stopping us from crashing into the wall and compare that to how shocking it would be to be a passenger if we don’t stop in time.

In the end it doesn’t really matter what the problem is, it matters that people who want the problem solved are not being effective enough to solve it.

Have you had your ideas dismissed or ignored by someone who you thought believed in the same things?  Or have you ever found yourself dismissing another person or their ideas because they aren’t exactly aligned with yours? There is something seductive about being able to find THE solution to all our problems (imagine being the hero who saves the world!) but what if there isn’t one solution? And I don’t think there is. How could there be one simple solution to saving this complex world? The solution must be made up of lots of people all doing their own part. It helps me to think of us all being a small part of the same thing. If there is a meaning to life I think it is to keep life going, and at the moment we aren’t doing a very good job of that. I am going to keep going though, and I am sure I will not be alone.

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11/10/2012

The Inklings: Chapter 37

By Anna

D’arby went home to his parent’s place two days before Christmas. He had mixed feelings about the trip. Of course he wanted to see his parents and he enjoyed being closer to nature, but he didn’t like the hot dry weather. He felt anxious about bushfires – he felt the need to scan the horizon every hour or so for signs of smoke. He also felt depressed thinking that this hot dry weather was most likely just going to become hotter, dryer and more frequent as the years passed. One of the main reasons D’arby felt the need to save the world was because he wanted to stop the bush he grew up in from dying. The thought of that landscape changing was enough to fill him with sadness and if he dwelt on the thought a terrible rage would well up in him. D’arby had grown up with people who didn’t care (or wouldn’t admit to caring) about nature despite living in it. He’d had arguments with them about whether animals had any right to exist. They had made fun of him for caring about trees. He’d defended his piece of bush from them when they turned up with their spotlights and shot guns, or trailers and chainsaws. But all his efforts had been in vain – and the people who didn’t care were going to win – because climate change was going to take the bush even if D’arby was on guard 24 hours a day. When D’arby thought about climate change he had a mental picture of a red-faced young man revving his perfectly polished ute, blasting out tones of carbon dioxide and laughing because, in the battle between him and D’arby, he knew he was going to win.

To cheer himself up a bit, D’arby went for a walk just before sunset (when it was cool enough to make being outside enjoyable) and imagined what it would be like to have invented a way to remove enough carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to reverse climate change. Of course D’arby had no idea how that could be achieved and suspected that it couldn’t be (not on a scale large enough with the resources available anyway).

D’arby’s thoughts then drifted back to the red faced man in the ute. Inside the red faced man’s head D’arby imagined that there was a yearning for an endless, softly undulating, treeless landscape – like the lawn covered hills that so often get associated with “green” products. D’arby felt the red faced man’s reptilian urge to bash the crap out of anything or anyone that made him feel uncomfortable, but D’arby also knew that the man had in his brain the capability for empathy and the ability to reason.

“Why don’t people use their brains!” yelled D’arby.

To calm himself down, D’arby took some deep breaths and tried to appreciate the sunset. Then he began walking home.

“I’m trapped on a planet with people who don’t care enough about it to look after it and yet none of us have anywhere else to go” D’arby complained to himself. He couldn’t help feeling that it had all been somehow organized as a challenge.

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04/10/2012

The Inklings: Chapter 36

By Anna

The next afternoon John went for a long walk. He wasn’t going anywhere in particular, he just wanted to get out of the house and do something. John was sick of being on holiday already. He wasn’t used to relaxing – he didn’t know how to enjoy it, and without anything to distract him, his mind kept wandering back to his problem of how to avoid going to gaol.

After a couple of hours of walking John needed a rest so he sat down on a seat in a park and started watching the other people in the park. Some people were sitting on the grass in the sun, others were walking their dogs, some people were conscientiously running laps and there was a group of adults watching their children play on the swings. Amongst all of this, one person caught John’s eye. There was a woman who was walking slowly around in an unpredictable pattern. “Maybe she is walking around to kill the holiday time like me” thought John. “Or maybe she’s thinking about her problems like me.” She was too far away for John to be able to work out the expression on her face so he walked closer, averting his eyes until he was near so it wouldn’t look like he was spying on her. When John got close he looked at the woman and was surprised to find that it was Syafika. He hadn’t recognized her in her hat and sunglasses.

“How are you going?” John asked. Syafika looked a bit confused when she saw him. He decided she must have been deep in thought – probably wondering about what Vincent was thinking.

“I’m ok” said Syafika

“Sorry about last night” said John.

“Don’t worry” replied Syafika. “It wasn’t your fault.”

There was a pause, which Syafika felt uncomfortable with so she added “I had to get out of the house so I wasn’t sitting around waiting for Vincent to return my calls.”

“I had to get out of the house too.” said John. “Otherwise I might have been tempted to put up some Christmas decorations. D’arby warned me to not even think about buying any, so instead I was thinking about making my own, but I know that would still be dangerous.”

Syafika was glad to have a reason to laugh and when she had finished she took the opportunity to ask John about something she’d been meaning to ask for a long time. “Hey, I think I saw you in this park months ago” said Syafika, and she couldn’t help smirking as she remembered. “You rubbed dog pooh into its owner’s hair.”

John stared blankly ahead while sifting through his memory. Eventually he came across a blurry memory of a rainy morning when he’d been feeling particularly angry.

“That sounds like something I would have done” John eventually answered and he made a mental note to add that incident to his list of things he could go to gaol for.

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21/09/2012

Don’t be discouraged by mass ignorance

By thespaarrrk

What can I do? I mean really, is there any point in caring? Does it make any difference? When I see images of starving children, or rainforest destruction, or when I’m confronted with the facts as to the extent of our current ecological and economic crisis, I think ‘This is wrong! We have to do something about this!’ But what can you do when our ‘elected representatives’ appear to be powerless to ‘fix’ the problems, and we live within a social framework that relies on, and encourages unethical, self-destructive behavior.

I’ve been campaigning and fighting political battles for decades. It’s tedious, exhausting and disheartening. I feel like I’ve been repeating myself for years, and still, most people just don’t want to listen and don’t seem to care. Why is it so hard to get people to act? I feel like I’m fighting a losing battle and even though, in my heart, I know that not caring or acting is wrong, I only have so much strength and will to keep believing that it’s worth it. Am I wasting my time? Would I be happier if I ignored my self-righteous urges and just made the most of what I have today? Should I just forget about future generations and injustice like everyone else seems perfectly happy to do?

Don’t give up. Your courage and perseverance are admirable, and the causes you’re fighting for are crucial. Never doubt what your heart tells you, and always say what’s in your heart. You are one of the few humans who‘s brave enough to look reality square in the eye without cringing or looking away. Not only are you unafraid to acknowledge what you see, you are also moved enough by what you see to want it to stop and you feel the need to do something about it.   It’s true, most people are unwilling to acknowledge or respond to the things they see, because they are humans, and humans have a very limited capacity to deal with future problems, particularly when their immediate needs are as relentless and demanding as most people’s obligations tend to be. Denial is a powerful tool that allows people to feel safe and comfortable in the face of crisis, and to continue on, business as usual, doing the things they do to make their problems worse. Don’t be discouraged by this mass ignorance. There are still plenty of other humans with resident sparks, who need you and appreciate you.  Some of them will be outspoken like you are, others may be quiet and disillusioned, but the more you continue to communicate your message by speaking up in public, writing letters, asking questions, submitting articles to publications and joining with other groups and individuals who share your concerns, the more you will be contributing to the solutions.  You can’t fight this battle alone, but you don’t need to.  Your team is out there waiting for you, you just need to find them and co-operate with them.  You will never be happier or more fulfilled than you are when you’re fighting for the things that are important to you. Exhaustion, tedium, disillusionment and despair are all part of this struggle, and without them your life would be bland and meaningless. Most people are not truly happy anyway. They are blinded by fear and insecurity and the loneliness that their pretention has created for them. They do act. Their actions consist of going through the motions of pretending to be alive. As long as your actions are honest and fair, and true to what you believe in, no matter what you do, it will always be worth it.

The Spark

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26/08/2012

The Inklings: Chapter 35

By Anna

It was the Sunday before Christmas. It was a hot afternoon, but not unbearably hot, just lovely Summer weather. Syafika had all the windows open to let in the warm breeze, which carried the smell of Jasmine flowers and traces of the incense that the neighbours were burning.

Fanta, D’arby and John were on their way and Syafika was clearing everything off the kitchen table to make room for them to screen print some T-shirts. All four of them were in a holiday mood, especially John because his restaurant was closed until January.

As they walked to Syafika’s place John and D’arby were each pulling a two-wheeled shopping trolleys full of blank T-shirts and screen printing materials. D’arby was hoping that this visit would be better than the last time they went to Syafika’s place. John was appreciating the contrast between how good he felt to be on holiday now with how he used to feel when he didn’t have a job to take holiday from.

Syafika had an even longer list of T-shirt ideas ready this time. She’d also made some iced tea. Her parents had gone for a walk.

John and D’arby arrived before Fanta. The combination of holiday time plus the heat and smell of flowers soon put them into a silly mood. John insisted that they put some music on and started going through Syafika’s music collection. When Fanta arrived John and D’arby were laughing as they tried to break dance to an album they remembered fondly. John put on Syafika’s bicycle helmet and was trying to spin on his head when the doorbell rang.

Syafika threw the door open without taking notice of who it was – she was busy laughing at John, who was actually pretty good at spinning on his head, and assumed it was her parents returning from their walk.

In walked Vincent. He was carrying a bunch of flowers, but did not look amused. When Syafika turned back to see who had come in the door Vincent greeted her with an expression that was a mixture of disappointment and anger. These emotions had so overcome him that all he could manage to say was “Well!” before he turned and left.

Syafika ran after Vincent, leaving John, D’arby and Fanta to look at each other guiltily. They realized now that they shouldn’t have agreed to meet at Syafika’s place, but the weather and their holiday moods had made them reckless.

Syafika wasn’t been able to get Vincent to stop walking. She chased him and tried to explain, but there really wasn’t anything to explain. Vincent had told Syafika to stay away from John and D’arby. He thought she would understand that it was a well-meant warning based on his experience. Syafika thought Vincent was being silly and bossy and had ignored his warning. She didn’t think Vincent would find out that she was still spending time with John and D’arby – Vincent had only given her a surprise visit once before, and although that was the time John and D’arby had been there Syafika hadn’t expected it to happen again.

When Syafika returned half an hour later her friends had gone. So had the screen printing stuff, and even her list of T-shirt ideas. The weather had changed. A cooler wind was blowing from another direction, bringing with it the smell of the damp manure that Rose had put on the front garden that morning.

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05/08/2012

The Inklings: Chapter 34

By Anna

Binta wondered why it was that after arguing with someone she always felt so much better, even when nothing had been resolved. Ever since she’d yelled at Fanta, Binta had felt much more positive about what had happened. She and Ousman had started talking again, and most importantly, Binta wasn’t angry with him or Fanta anymore. She wasn’t quite ready to admit that she was happy about what they’d been up to, but she was excited to think that Ousman might soon meet his father. She wondered what Mamadou would think of their son and before she could stop herself, Binta started wondering what Mamadou would think of her now.

Binta remembered when, earlier that year, Fanta had given Syafika a painting done by Mamadou. Now she realized that Fanta must have known who Mamadou was when she met him on holiday and bought that painting. Indeed, Fanta must have already known who Mamadou was before she visited him – Fanta must have tracked Mamadou down and just pretended she was a tourist. Binta blushed when she realized that Fanta must have known who Mamadou was talking about when he told her (thinking she was just a tourist) that he’d been planning to marry an Australian woman until he found out that she didn’t trust him. At the time Binta wished she could have told her side of the story, but now she realized that she may as well go along with Mamadou’s version because it was true that she hadn’t trusted Mamadou. When it happened Binta thought she had good reason not to trust Mamadou, but now she could see that she had added a large amount of imagination to small inconsistencies in some of the things Mamadou said. In her head she had turned minor things into major ones and instead of asking Mamadou to explain things that didn’t make sense she’d accused him of things he hadn’t done.

“I should have known!” said Binta to herself when she remembered how every time she’d gotten angry with Mamadou he’d been able to turn things around and make it her fault. Of course it made sense that their arguments would always be at least partly because of things Binta did, so it wasn’t fair for her to assign all the blame to Mamadou in the first place, but Binta hadn’t been able to see that when she was angry. Binta hoped she was wiser now. She didn’t think that Mamadou would have forgiven her though and hoped that Mamadou wouldn’t let his anger at her affect his relationship with Ousman.

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23/07/2012

Inklings of how to save the world

By Anna

Some keen readers may have noticed that The Inkling has not published a feature article since November last year (when Sustainability was posted). There is another feature in the pipeline, but because it is bigger and better than the first two it is much harder and more time consuming to prepare. To keep you entertained in the meantime, The Inkling has decided to give you some idea of what goes on when The Inkling writes these articles.

Rotating Democracy (sort of like Sortition)

By The Inkling

When looking at how to move towards a sustainable world, one thing keeps coming up – our democracy isn’t working as well as it should.

Even if we elect good people, being in a position of power changes their brains (reducing empathy), plus, of course, baddies tend to gravitate towards positions of power.

We see that vested interests keep getting their way and “the people” aren’t doing anything about it. Then most of us sit back and rely on politicians to fix things, and don’t even bother engaging with politics or the issues well enough to keep the politicians in line.

I keep hearing how the only way to solve our environmental and social problems is to get people to participate in their communities and politics, but how? And even if we managed to convince people to participate more now, how would we stop things from degenerating back to the way they are now at some time in the future (when community enthusiasm lapses)?

How many people love their politicians these days? Who would feel sad if they suddenly lost their jobs? What about political parties and powerbrokers? Who would feel much sympathy for them?

What if instead of electing politicians we took turns? Imagine if politics was like Jury Duty and it was likely that at some time during your life you’d be randomly selected to serve a Parliamentary term (or Council term)?

And what if instead of dissolving the whole Parliament at once, each person’s term expired at a different time, so that Parliament changed the representatives that made it up gradually like an animal replaces cells?

Of course there are lots of details that would have to be sorted out, like rules for how representatives could behave (they’d have to be kicked out if they broke the rules and replaced by the next random person) and the conditions under which a person could “get out of” their turn, but basically the idea would be that “the people” were responsible for governing the place. No more complaining about how crap all the politicians or parties are. And what better way to get people to be interested than to make it likely that they will have to be the one doing the job at some point!

What do you reckon? Would our politicians vote for it?

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02/07/2012

The Inklings: Chapter 33

By Anna

Syafika was furious to wake up and realise that it was Monday. She’d wasted the weekend waiting for Fanta to call and apologise (which Fanta hadn’t done) and now, not only was it time to go back to work again, but because Fanta hadn’t apologized Syafika had to decide whether to demonstrate her hurt by staying home that night and missing the meeting (which she had really been looking forward to) or to go to the meeting and risk looking like she wasn’t very upset with Fanta. Syafika picked up the phone and was about to call Vincent and ask him what she should do when she realized that she couldn’t do that either because she’d promised Vincent she wouldn’t go to any more of the meetings.

Since Wednesday Syafika had been stewing. She was incredibly hurt that Fanta had been keeping secrets from her and was even more hurt (and very jealous) that Fanta had been collaborating with her awful little cousin Ousman. Another element of Syafika’s hurt was that she was starting to realize that she needed Fanta more than Fanta needed her.

At last Syafika decided to give in and go to the meeting. Staying home would just make her even angrier. Besides, Fanta would have probably made a nice cake for dessert.

Poor John wasn’t in a good way either. The scare he’d got when Vincent turned up at Syafika’s place had made him start thinking about the precarious situation he was in. Since then John had spent every spare moment thinking about how he could avoid going to gaol. He was now feeling really depressed because he couldn’t think of a way of cutting off his past. And John wasn’t worried just for himself. He could see that whatever happened to him would also affect Fanta, his family and even D’arby. It would even affect their plans to “save the world”.

Syafika was right, Fanta did make a cake for the meeting. As Fanta took it out of the oven that afternoon she was wondering whether the meeting would go any better than their first. Fanta was hoping that if she made an extra special dinner it would help Syafika forgive her. Fanta was also worried about John, who had been distant that week. She could tell something was on his mind but when she asked him if anything was wrong he tried to pretend that nothing was.

D’arby was oblivious to all the dramas of his friends. He had been too engrossed in his latest draft of his plan to save the world to notice that John was depressed.

Fanta finished setting the table just at the time they’d agreed to meet. Then she looked out the window but couldn’t see any of her guests coming so she went to check that there was a fresh hand towel in the bathroom. Fanta then spent the next half an hour doing various unimportant household jobs, and checking out the window every five minutes or so. Finally she sat down and regretted having organized for her aunt and uncle to take her sisters out for the evening because it looked like nobody was going to turn up for the meeting. Who was going to eat all the food now?

Then there was a knock at the door and the next thing Fanta knew, John and D’arby were showering her with excuses for being so late. Just behind them was Syafika. She came in without saying much and soon all of them were sitting around the table.

Dinner was strangely silent. D’arby kept getting out his notes, looking at them, folding them up and putting them back in his pocket. The rustling sound was annoying Syafika. She hadn’t brought any notes this time. She’d been too angry to remember to bring her notes and was disappointed because she couldn’t remember her ideas without them.

Everyone was relieved when the dinner had all been eaten, even Syafika. As Fanta poured everyone cups of tea, D’arby skimmed through his notes once more and then stood up, cleared his throat and began.

“I’ve been trying to work out whether there is any root cause to the rot we were talking about last week. Is there any one thing that we can focus on that will make more difference than others? Anyway, this is what I’ve come up with so far:

It all started while I was watching the news. The usual finance reporter was showing graphs and talking about how consumers where still saving rather than spending so the retail outlook was grim and economic growth was threatened. I started to wonder whether all these “consumers” were really saving, or whether they’d made the same realization that I’d made and had decided they didn’t want to be consumers anymore. What if everyone stopped buying so much because they didn’t want to keep using resources unsustainably? What would that do to the economy? Would there be a recession? A depression? What are those things anyway? Can our economic system survive if we live more sustainably? I mean, even with increased efficiency, continual economic growth is impossible so either we stuff the planet or we stuff the economy, right? I know I’m not the only person who can see this problem so why are we so determined to stick to this path? Why aren’t we changing the economy?

I’d be surprised if it wasn’t those who benefit from the current system who are keeping things on the current path – so we may as well blame the richest people, but it isn’t just their fault because everyone else is letting them get away with it.

Anyway, if these rich people don’t care that they are destroying the planet and that they will be remembered as having been the biggest arseholes who ever lived, then why not? Are they psychopaths? Let’s assume that they are, even just for the fun of it.”

D’arby paused and looked at his audience. They seemed to be paying attention but he wasn’t sure they were following. He hadn’t been following his notes so he put them down on the table and just kept talking without them.

“I guess you’ve heard how corporations are inherently evil, and probably run by psychopaths and that corporations influence our governments so we can probably blame them for keeping us on a path to destruction – psychopaths via corporations, that is. And corporations probably turn normal people into virtual psychopaths too.

So what can we do about it? Can we make the normal people fight the system? Or can we fight the psychopaths directly? Or both?

I’ve been reading papers about psychopaths and I can’t say things are very clear. There isn’t total agreement on what one is, let alone on what to do about them. Some people reckon they might be able to come up with a treatment, but I can’t imagine psychos volunteering to take medication. I also worry that if we knew what makes a psycho someone would probably have a go at creating more of them – in some professions having empathy holds you back.

This gets me back to behaviour and the only thing I’ve ever been able to change. I think I know how to cure addiction, but can I cure a psychopath? Should I spend my time trying to work out how to do something I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to do or should I spend my time doing something I have already done before? Or can we do both?”

D’arby stopped again and looked at his audience, waiting for an answer but their faces were blank. This response made D’arby very annoyed. He sighed and sat down, shaking his head and was about to voice his disgust when John’s face lit up.

“I think he means he agrees with my idea and that we should keep putting the pills in the pizzas!” said John, with a triumphant smile on his face.

D’arby let out an exasperated laugh and then said “Yes, but only while we try to work out what else we can do.”

Fanta and Syafika just nodded and wondered what their roles in this plan were going to be.

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