Tuesday 15th September 2015
Do not put your trust in princes,
in mortals, in whom there is no help.
When their breath departs, they return to the earth;
on that very day their plans perish.
Psalm 146:3-4
I woke up this morning to the news that we have a new Prime Minister. News programs had started earlier than usual as everyone was agog with excitement, anger, hope and insider gossip. I watched the news and interviews over my breakfast, then went to work. No-one mentioned the coup in Canberra. It seemed it was neither interesting nor important to their everyday lives.
Way back in 1927 in “The Phantom Public,” Walter Lippmann described this sense of alienation. “The private citizen has come to feel rather like a deaf spectator in the back row, who ought to keep his mind on the mystery off there, but cannot quite manage to stay awake. He knows he is somehow affected by what is going on. Rules and regulations continually, taxes annually, and wars occasionally remind him that he is being swept along by great drifts of circumstance. Yet these public affairs are in no convincing way his affairs. They are for the most part invisible. … He lives in a world in which he cannot see, does not understand, and is unable to direct.”
T
he vines arrived yesterday for our new vineyard. Yesterday, we unpacked them and put them into water laced with some SeaSol to wake them up and got our systems ready. Today is the first day of planting, which is exciting and cathartic. It has been 12 months of planning and preparation to get to this stage, so it’s great to finally be getting into it. My small team of workers arrived early and after a coffee and a briefing on the work ahead we set to work.
Within our little world, the news from Canberra is neither interesting nor important. Being with friends, planting vines creates a sense of progress and a feeling that better things are to come. We were all involved in planning, now in planting and we’ll all be here to see things grow. This is the stuff of happiness for ordinary people.
“Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.”
Matthew 5:5