The Rot Beneath the Floor.

A 'floor' comes out and the keel bolt is good!

Whether it’s a boat that leaks too much, climate change, the war in Syria or the war on unwanted babies, which is currently in danger of spreading to Ireland…;  they all contribute to a rising tide of anxiety. We may refuse to acknowledge it, and many are the resources available for us when we just want to drown it out and float away on a tide of addiction of one kind or another, junk food for the belly and the media circuses like football for the mind; but the fearful anxiety is there, and it fuels all tyranny as well as poisoning our own relationships and perceptions. The less it is confronted, the more dangerous it becomes, distorting and obscuring all perception of truth.

The struggle for peace is the struggle for truth, which is however, as George Orwell pointed out, the first victim of war. Our first move, if we hunger for truth, justice and peace, is to combat our own addictions, ‘remove the plank from our own eye’. For example, a society which counternances in late term abortions the killing of the baby by lethal injection would do well to think about that before getting too self-righteous about other forms of chemical warfare. Which said, the very blatant lies from the murderous thugs who run the Syrian and Russian Governments do have to be confronted.

The West’s ability to do so effectively has long been compromised, especially since the invasion of Iraq. It’s not, as seems to be commonly accepted these days, that the rationale given for that war was necessarily a lie, since no weapons of mass destruction were eventually to be found there. Saddam Hussein had already used them, and according to an Iraqi Airforce General whom I happened to hear on the radio, at the time UN inspectors were looking for them, they had been sent over the border to Syria. The fundamental hypocrisy involved in the decision to invade Iraq was again a matter primarily of the West’s addictions; in this case, I refer to the addiction to oil.

If we are serious about trying to take the burning heat out of the Near and Middle East, and about also tackling our own anxieties, above all and first of all we have to recognise that our use of oil is very often as a destructive addiction, and it is causing havoc on all sides. We try to assuage our anxieties in all kinds of hidden ways, some of them perfectly reasonable, like for example going to sea in small sailing boats. When anxieties take immediate and concrete form, such as whether our boat might sink, then we can confront them and do something about them, thus perhaps assuaging the more fundamental ones in relation to which we feel completely powerless. Sometimes, in times like these when the rockets are flying, our little finger in the dyke is overwhelmed and our strategy breaks down.

Aboard the Anna M, not content with rooting out the rot beneath the steel floors to which the keel is bolted, I’m taking the struggle to a new dimension! Having talked about it for years but never in a position to act, I’m going to take a final swipe at my oil addiction, and see if I can possibly avoid reinstalling the fuel tanks and the diesel engine. Instead, I hope to install an electric drive that will derive its power primarily from the sails when we are sailing well, with sufficient surplus power to recharge the batteries by turning the propellor and the same alternator/motor. Solar panels as well as shore power will also feature, and possibly a back-up diesel generator or even fuel cells. Hmmm, we shall see!

Confronting Anxiety by Fiona.