Category: Politics

Where now with globalisation?

31st May, Hay book festival, and a talk by Cambridge lecturer (in public policy), Finbarr Livesey (billed as a conversation with Andy Fryers) on the subject of Livesey’s new book: From Global to Local’.

The subtitle carries quite a punch: ‘The Making of Things and the End of Globalisation.’

Is globalisation the only paradigm, is hyper-globalisation inevitable? Livesey argues powerfully against this thesis. An archetypal example of globalisation is the development almost by accident of the shipping container by a US trucking magnate in the 1950s. And the biggest downside is the level of emissions produced by moving product around the world, primarily by sea.

Major developments are underway which are changing this, 3D printing, with books being produced almost to order being one classic and small-scale example.

Robotics scale down the labour requirement, factories in China with vast labour forces will no longer dominate the production process as they have for the last twenty years.

How we make the journey from idea and design to finished item is being radically reconceptualised. Adidas already make running shoes bespoke to your exact requirement. The Finnish bike maker Jopo brought manufacturing back home to Finland when they realised that their quality standards were more easily and more cheaply met back home. Zara work to a tight timescale which requires local not Far Eastern production. Amazon are even looking at the possibilities of making some products en route to the customer. (Quite how this would work I don’t know!)

In the light of Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement (yesterday, 2nd June), a comment by Livesey on the agreement is put into even sharper focus: ‘As countries commit to harder, binding targets for emissions reductions, the ideas of reuse, remanufacturing, circularity and zero waste will all gain more currency and increase the uptake of ideas across industry.’ China and the EU have come together to condemn Trump. Put that also in the context of the statement two days ago from the EU’s climate commissioner, Miguel Arias Cañete: ‘The EU and China are joining forces to forge ahead on the implementation of the Paris agreement and accelerate the global transition to clean energy.’

Where is the UK in this?

Trump may briefly be taking the USA out of the loop, but the ideas mentioned by Livesey are ideas that could make up the substance of the closer cooperation, between EU and China, plus India, Canada, and most other countries, in the years and decades to come.

Circularity: ideas for making refurbishing reusing, sharing, zero waste, minimising emissions, avoiding landfill… against traditional linear notions of take, make, dispose. The straight line to landfill against the closed loop of reuse. There are, as Livesey is only too well aware, only signs of this at the moment, but bringing production back home is a vital first step. And there’s the example of IKEA, which has moved from ideas such as sustainable sourcing to offering buybacks and creating markets for second-hand IKEA furniture. Nike has stated it wants to double its business while halving its environmental impact: a recent Nike report states that ‘the future will be circular.’

I’ve only touched on themes here. It is early days, but Livesey outlines as I see it an attainable future, more climate-friendly and one which would be underpinned by countries working together: supply chains much more local than at present, and sharing to the benefit of consumers, businesses and countries as an economic reality.

Out on to the Silk Road …

The new Silk Road – will the direction of traffic be primarily east to west, west to east, or both – and who will control the flow?

I’ve posted recently on the subject of history, and how we abuse it. But sometimes we do need the big picture, and I’m thinking here of China President Xi’s $900 million Belt and Road initiative to build a modern-day Silk Road.

History provides a vital context, and a warning.

Forty-six nations attended a gathering in Beijing last weekend. Heads of state from Rusia and Turkey were there, though not from Europe. The EU held back from endorsing a final statement because it didn’t stress ‘transparency and co-ownership’. India argued the scheme is ‘little more than a colonial enterprise [that would leave] debt and broken communities in its wake’.

Philip Hammond attended (not our high-risk foreign secretary, I note), relishing the opportunity for trade deals. In his speech to delegates he argued Britain was a ‘natural partner’ for China. ‘China and the UK have a long and rich trading history…’  Others have commented that the Chinese, remembering the 19th century Opium Wars, and the great British imperial enterprise, might see this ‘natural partnership’ in  different way.

There’s something telling in this sycophancy. Sycophancy comes out of weakness, not strength. The EU holds back, argues from a position of strength. India is rebarbative, confrontational, overstates it – yet there’s truth lurking there. Circumspection has its merits.

Britain in the 16th century set up its own maritime Silk Road, along with the Dutch, Portuguese and (less successfully) the French. The Belt and Road initiative is the land route reasserting itself. The old oceanic skills of Empire will no longer help us. We are one of many, supplicants, out on a western European limb.

There will be many camel trains along the new road, if it develops the way the Chinese wish. We might just be a little lonely. On a camel train, as out on the ocean, there is strength in numbers.

 

Brexit and the abuse of history

History is our best and only guide to our future. In the last analysis we rely on evidence (which itself is always open to challenge). Doctrine, dogma, ideology, big ideas – they all escape evidence all too easily.

I thought it time to look at a few examples of the way history is abused by supporters of Brexit. In an attempt to change the way that history is framed. As with scientists and climate change the assumption is that historians are engaged in some kind of conspiracy. The Govean disparaging of expertise opens up the field. Interpretation becomes a free-for-all. Bias is owned lightly, he (and it seems it’s mainly he) who corners the airwaves calls the tune.

It’s insidious. Even the mild-mannered Giles Fraser, one time Canon of St Paul’s, is caught up in it. Reference his review in the current Prospect of Eamon Duffy’s Reformation Divided. There’s the argument that Rome (papal Rome) and Brussels are somehow synonymous.. Fraser refers to Thomas More ‘fighting a rearguard action against a 16th century Brexit. Substitute the Bishop of Rome for the Treaty of Rome and it appears we have been fighting over Brexit for centuries.’

There’s a harsher more vituperative tone to David Starkey, an example of an historian who has sacrificed academic credentials for a new career of opinion and disputation. Starkey unashamedly links the the 16th and 21st centuries. Brexit is our second Reformation, escaping a continental behemoth. Suffice it to say that sovereignty means something radically different today from the 16th century. A restrictive theocratic establishment bears no comparison whatever to a institution dedicated to opening not closing borders.

The German sociologist, Max Weber, whose book on the Protestant work ethic was published in 1905, is also brought into the argument. Turned by some today into an attack on southern and Catholic Europe, seen as having a malign influence on the EU – so we are best out of it. David Starkey for one is no friend of Catholics. And yet – France of course is as close to a secular nation as you can get, and southern Germany is largely Catholic… Italy and Spain have a remarkable industrial record. The old Catholic Church was a heavy restraint – but most of western Europe long ago put aside such restraints.

Then there’s Nick Timothy, Theresa May’s right-hand man, claiming Joseph Chamberlain, social reformer and advocate of economic power based on ‘Greater Britain’, as an inspiration. Chamberlain as a social radical turned Tory was an altogether bigger beast than Theresa May, operating in a radically different political context, and in an age of empire. Timothy’s comparisons are convenient, and spurious.

In a similar vein we have the Anglosphere beloved of Daniel Hannan and Michael Gove, and a good few others – the notion that there is some wide English-speaking identity, tradition and loyalty which can form the basis of future trading patterns, and which has to date been restricted by our trading relations with our near European neighbours. The Empire lives on, and other countries will come somehow to doff their caps to their one-time British overlords. Old loyalties will trump self-interest, overlooking the fact that trade is a brutal game.

For my part, I’m intrigued by these arguments. History is a broad church and thrives on interpretation and counter interpretation. It’s always pushing back boundaries, bringing to bear new research, widening our understanding. And yet – it is a poor guide to our futures. Linking the Reformation, Henry VIII, the Protestant work ethic and European economic dominance is a highly questionable activity.

What we can be quite certain of is that the consequences of Brexit will not be what any of us expect – whether we’re yea or nay sayers.

**

There’s also this quote (source Wikipedia) from a 2003 New York Times article in which the historian Niall Ferguson pointed out that data from the OECD seems to confirm that ‘the experience of Western Europe in the past quarter-century offers an unexpected confirmation of the Protestant ethic. To put it bluntly, we are witnessing the decline and fall of the Protestant work ethic in Europe. This represents the stunning triumph of secularisation in Western Europe—the simultaneous decline of both Protestantism and its unique work ethic.’

A highly questionable thesis in the first place. And Western Europe too easily becomes synonymous with the EU, Brexit a brave new world which will see the revival of both the work ethic and our economic prosperity.

And maybe the old British Empire as well…

Walking in the Lake District with Mrs May

Father, son and daughter in the Lake District. No talk of politics, just much sharing of music, all our of favourites, from fifty years back in my case, back to Grace Slick belting out White Rabbit – where did such amazing music come from when all had been doldrums only ten years before. Not quite so far back for Ben and Rozi, but they have good taste, and are slowly convincing me that I should love You can be heroes...wrong… We can be heroes… wrong again, just Heroes, and maybe come round to David Bowie after all these years. Now that he’s gone.

We try and avoid politics, though father and daughter are political animals. Whoops of delight when I see that all the election posters in Coniston are for the LibDem candidate. What, I wonder, does Theresa May talk about with her husband, and passing strangers, when out walking? And what if I met her out walking? A cheery good morning?

Bagehot in the Economist has a piece on Theresa May, under the heading Tory of Tories. Her Britain he writes is ‘the Britain of the Tory heartlands, a Britain of solid values and rooted certainties, hard work and upward mobility, a Britain where people try to get ahead but also have time for the less fortunate’. That made me wonder. What’s to disagree? Well, let’s get started…

Rooted certainties – that of course has never been England, or the UK. It’s our ability to change, to move quickly, to adapt, to draw on skills from around the world (here in the Lake District the Coniston mines and Millom tannery are two local examples) that has made us what we are. Not clinging to rooted certainties. ‘Solid values’ – a euphemism too often for closing ranks against the world. ‘Hard work’ – it’s inspiration, and we’ve drawn over centuries much inspiration, and wisdom, from Europe, we need as well. ‘Upward mobility’ – and what of those left behind? Not the JAMs, the just about managing, an invented concept if ever there was one, but those whose disadvantages of birth and position deny any opportunity of upward progress. The Tory world is too often a world where the barriers comes down, and the shutters.

There’s another free-trading Tory as well, a different breed, and they have a curious co-existence with the heartland Tory. Not Mrs May’s world at all, nor it seems that of her ‘guru’, Nick Timothy,  who likes to quote Joseph Chamberlain as a hero, claiming him as a people’s champion against … free trade. Falling into the old trap of quoting history out of context, one that seems to be everywhere in these post Brexit days.

All a frightful muddle.

And if we’d met her out walking? A cheery hello, as I manage with most walkers, that would have to suffice. Puzzling over the contradictions of Mrs May would be for another time, and the certainties.

Walking is about the next horizon, and the one after that, and horizons open up as you travel to take in the whole world…

 

 

 

The day after…

So we’re the day after. Theresa May has invoked Article 50, officially received by Donald Tusk. From a Brit to a Pole, a document that’s tantamount to a surrender of our status in the world. Ironic, remembering 1939, when we went to war for Poland.

I’ve often thought post referendum that this blog belonged to another age. Might a Zen approach to politics, bringing wisdom and compassion, as understood in Buddhist terms, to bear, no longer be of its time?

Engagement, street-corner politics, arguing, rallying, taking sides, contrasting opposites – we may seek to hold to the truth but when the other side embellishes or distorts then we have to counter – and the language of attack and counter-attack isn’t always sweet. I tried the counter-attack last year. But that’s for another blog. For now, a simple statement, from the Buddha, no less:

How wonderful, how miraculous that all beings are endowed with the wisdom of the Tathagata [someone who has achieved enlightenment]. Only sadly human beings because of their attachments are not aware of it.

The ultimate attachment is to ‘I’, which is out there all the time asserting its identity, in a state of more or less insecurity, seeking reassurance, arguing, shoring up its position.

24-hour news is part of this. Listening every few hours, even every hour. Always engaged with the minutiae, and responding yea or nay to each news item – agreeing, disagreeing. Encouraged, depressed. Even if we’ve escaped the high and lows we’re always in there with the buzz of it all.

As a contrast, take a simple image, water in a glass vessel, conforming to its size and shape. We want to change the moment, or change the world. We pour the water out, find another vessel.

But imagine the universe as a vessel, and the laws which govern it – the laws of the tao (see the Tao Te Ching), the Buddha wisdom, the Christian gospel message of love, which is universal – as the water within.

The day-to-day is about change. That is what life is, change and becoming. But chucking out the water, changing the vessel, endless agitation, that can never be the way forward. The way of wisdom moves more slowly, wisdom lies in silence and in a quieter, more measured understanding.

And that is not the mood or way of our times!

Beware converts

(reference article by David Goodhart in the FT Weekend, 18th March 2017)

Beware converts. Or better, conversions. People who change sides, as Ronald Reagan did, and I remember the one-time New Stateman editor turned right-wing commentator, Paul Johnson. And didn’t Melanie Phillips, she of the vitriol and the non-sequitur, once write for the Guardian? To switch abruptly suggests an over-simplification of argument, you switch from believer to atheist, you’ve seen the light, you’re St Paul on the road to Damascus.

The most important corrective is always to see the other side, to take it, argue it, from time to time. You don’t have to be a racist to argue in favour of restrictions on immigration, or an inveterate woman-hater to argue against abortion. Passions run deep in life and politics, especially when you’re young, and if you’re not passionate in your 20s then you ought to be. But if we’re looking to educate young people in citizenship, let’s also make that civility, and more than civility, empathy, and more than empathy, tucking yourself inside the other’s shell from time to time.

Why am I writing this? There’s a fine political commentator, David Goodhart, founder of one of my favourite magazines, Prospect, and he’s just published a book entitled ‘The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics’. He divides the population very broadly into ‘somewheres’ and ‘anywheres’.  Anywheres are more mobile, usually university-educated, they have ‘high human capital, [they] will thrive in open, competitive systems and only be held back by prejudice or protectionism’. Freedom of movement, membership of the EU, will have obvious advantages. Somewheres are ‘more rooted, generally less well-educated… and prioritise attachment and security’.

It’s a helpful distinction. A typical urban community is disparate, and local communication minimal. A suburban or small-town or village community is more likely to be a community – to be more homogeneous, localised – and people talk to neighbours, meet up at sport clubs and the like.

So where’s my gripe with Goodhart? He wrote an essay back in 2004 about the tension between diversity and solidarity, he thought it uncontroversial, but he ‘met the intolerance of the modern left for the first time’. He was even accused of racism. (I’ve my own experience of this left-leaning mentality.) Goodhart now claims to have left the tribe – but he then describes it as ‘the liberal tribe that had been my home for 25 years’. [My italics.]

I’m a liberal, four square, and first and foremost I don’t accept I’m of the left, modern or otherwise.  Nor the right. Nor the ‘centre’, wherever that might be. I’ve long argued for compassion, caring (shared but interpreted differently by left and right) and community. As well as initiative and enterprise. ‘Big society’ ideas left me cold because they were top-down, and community is instinctive, bottom-up. (The downside of London life is the isolation. The upside of village life can be – well, is – almost too much community.)

(The ‘liberal left’ is a popular term. It’s where many people stand politically. But ‘liberal’ and ‘left’ are distinct terms, distinct political placements. And elements of the press love to emphasise the ‘left’, so ‘liberal’ gets pulled off-centre, and damned for being something that it isn’t.)

Goodhart also has this throw-away comment: ‘Ask English people at a middle-class London dinner-party whether they are proud of their country and they will get bluster and embarrassment.’ Maybe his dinner parties, not mine – and don’t rely on dinner-parties for your straw poll!

He sees himself as a centrist, open to ideas from left and right: ‘Indeed I am now post-liberal and proud.’ I’d argue that he’s now achieved liberal status for the first time, having shed old allegiances. He accuses liberalism of an over-reach that produced the Brexit and Trump backlashes. That I think is too easy, too cheap, and a touch cowardly. We’re back to being a convert, taking sides.

Goodhart is taking a risk by pigeon-holing and denigrating liberalism, arguing for a more woolly, inchoate alternative, where people fall back on the instinctive protectiveness of tribes, whether some- or any-where. It’s left liberalism that’s his target, but he’s risking bringing down a wider liberal mindset at the same time.

Liberals, in their Liberal Democrat guise, within and especially away from the big city have a strong community emphasis. That’s why pre-Coalition they were so successful as a local level – and increasingly are now.

Curiously it’s where I think Goodhart is headed. It isn’t a retreat from liberalism, it’s an avowal of all that’s best about it, and he doesn’t need to be throwing sops to the harder elements of the right-wing, which is what I fear he’s been doing.

Abandoning your ‘tribe’ carries big risks. You can easily get tainted by another.

A puzzling innocence

Back in January I wrote a poem which touched on a nightmare which I trusted with the bright and clear skies, and warmth, of June would evaporate. It didn’t, of course.

There is a foolish innocence abroad in the land. I thought back in January that we could all handle it with gentle irony. Now it’s for real – and the irony, still gentle, has a sharper focus. Irony better than anger? I’m not sure!

*

A puzzling innocence
at home on English shores

Is it a puzzling innocence, that we should wish
to shake ourselves free of all the sand and salt,
a dog out of the waves,

more than sand and salt –
we would be somewhere else, another beach –

the same waves, the same wrack and kelp,
but the sea would be somehow different,

the tide driven by another moon and
under that new moon we’d trade our goods

beyond our shores unfettered, be more English –
the moon an English moon –

ours would be
a calculated innocence, a glorious future,
an imagination of a past when we rode oceans –

grew rich on other lands – unshackled, the sea
we’d command would stretch no more than

a few miles off our shores, yet we would
still be lords –  you say,

                         it’s bright-eyed innocence
to see only the benign, the old navy afloat,
a few new tugboats on calm and peaceful waters –

but who needs containers in this grand design –

where once we traded pounds we’d trade in pence
and who are you to say, that’s not a better way

(c) Chris Collier, January 2016

Troubadours for our time

Leonard Cohen and Victor Jara 

Troubadour, two definitions : 1) medieval lyric poet/musician; 2) a singer, especially of folk songs. (Merriam Webster) It’s the first definition I like.

The death of Leonard Cohen set me to thinking. Who might be the troubadours of our own time? Troubadours for our time?

I tried in an early version of this post to characterise Leonard Cohen as somehow in that medieval tradition. As a poet of love, even courtly love. He was inspired and tormented by his muse, and his audience connected and were inspired in turn. But I’m foolish to try and say more than that. The more I listen to his songs the more in awe I am. There’s a fine piece by Edward Doxx connecting Cohen to John Donne. It gets closer than I ever could. He quotes Cohen:  ‘So come, my friends, be not afraid/We are so lightly here/It is in love that we are made/in love we disappear.’

Cohen didn’t take up the cudgels against violence and injustice, as Dylan once did.  Nor did he understand ‘the other side’ quite as Woody Guthrie did: ‘As I went walking I saw a sign there/And on the sign it said “No Trespassing.”/But on the other side it didn’t say nothing,/That side was made for you and me.’

But he did write and sing ‘Democracy’, which lays bare a dysfunctional USA, but in the midst of it all just about finds reason for optimism. ‘It’s coming to America first,/the cradle of the best and of the worst./It’s here they got the range/and the machinery for change/and it’s here they got the spiritual thirst.’ 

Asked two years ago if songs can offer solutions to political problems, he replied, ‘I think the song itself is a kind of solution.’

Dylan back in the 60s confronted the ‘masters of war’ and racists: ‘William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll,/with a gun that he twirled around his diamond ring finger.’ There was a rawness about Dylan back then, just voice and guitar and a language we’d never heard. There’s something about a troubadour who carries his guitar and gathers an audience around him wherever he might be. (Once or twice I did just that!) No band in sight.

Dylan put overt protest behind him, took on another persona,  many personas – but he’s still the troubadour.

As for others …..Buffy Sainte-Marie has long been a favourite of mine. ‘Welcome welcome emigrante,’ words for our own time as much as hers. Pete Seeger and Euan MacColl were at the political coal-face: amazingly MacColl also wrote ‘The first time ever I saw your face’. Joan Baez has never lost her touch or her commitment, or her ability to inspire. She was the first for me, back over fifty years ago.

Bruce Springsteen, a man with a guitar, and a rock band. A different kind of troubadour. As for Steve Earle, ‘hardcore troubadour’, Springsteen may have been the ‘consummate chronicler of welfare-line blues, but Steve had lived the life’. (Lauren St John).

There’s another , who I’ve just re-discovered, playing my old vinyls. Someone who maybe I should have put first, ahead even of Cohen, Guthrie, Dylan. I’m thinking of Victor Jara, a Chilean troubadour who died for his songs, his poetry, his guitar, his beliefs, his hands first broken, and then murdered in the stadium in Santiago on 1973, when Pinochet with CIA backing overthrew the Allende regime. His songs have a purity and a magic, and a simple beauty, and they stop me in my tracks.

Yes, my guitar is a worker/shining and smelling of spring/my guitar is not for killers/greedy for money and power/but for the people who labour/so that the future may flower. (His last poem, which could never be a song, written in the stadium.)

The Beatles could have been troubadours, if they’d followed the direction taken by Penny Lane and Eleanor Rigby. Ralph McTell (Streets of London) was memorable, though sentimental. Billy Bragg never sentimental, stridently political, a street singer. But in truth he never inspired me. One song that did was Peter Gabriel’s lament for Steve Biko, which is searing, searching, and angry.

Edith Piaf, Charles Aznavour, Yves Montand… chanteurs/chanteuses, troubadours. There’s a Gallic intensity we Brits and Americans find hard to match. They’ve inspired me, but they’re not my focus here.

For I’ve a question. For anyone who reads this, for my children, for generations born in the 1970s, 80s, 90s, even the noughties.

Who are your troubadours?

Singers and poets for whom words matter, for whom stories matter, for whom love matters, and above all – injustice. Who sing to be heard, and to be understood. Who sing with passion and with anger.

Back in the 60s the civil rights movement galvanised us, in the UK as well as the USA. Apartheid likewise. We’d a sense that history was on our side, justice and social justice would prevail. Now, in 2016, post Brexit and the Trump election we’re on the defensive. Nativist, racist and sexist attitudes find favour. Trump somehow finds the rule of law and torture compatible.

(Trump and torture reminded me of Victor Jara. Pinochet’s soldiers thought torture and death legitimate. Once hatred in engendered anything is possible.)

Who is singing for us, writing songs, wanting to be heard? Who will be singing?

Maybe we’ve been listening to the music too much in recent decades, and we’ve forgotten the song.

Taking politics out of zenpolitics …

Back before I took ten days out from the world I wondered about the future of my zenpolitics blog. ‘Politics and creativity, blogs and poetry are uneasy bedfellows….There has to be something obsessive about a political blog, and I may want to put obsession behind me.’

Which, indeed, I do.

Trump happened while I was away. Here in the UK, judges insisted that the government couldn’t invoke Article 50 without first putting it before parliament. Theresa May had an embarrassing trip to India. She looked out of her depth. I could but don’t want to comment on all this. I’ve spent years doing so, and especially in this Brexit year. But with so much going on it’s almost a full-time job just to keep up to speed. Let alone comment.

We are in a time of crisis. Zenpolitics has always assumed a continuing broadly liberal agenda in Western politics, and that’s now very much under threat. If, as the Economist argues, Trump’s success is replicated in Europe, ‘the EU may eventually tilt toward a common assembly for mutually beneficial transactions rather than a club of like-minded countries with a sense of shared destiny’.

I will continue to argue for that shared destiny.  But to look out for insights and inspiration, and anomalies, and avoid day-to-day combat. Insights into politics, but also I hope into landscapes, real and imaginary, and travel.

I will as always aim to understand the other’s point of view. But there are a good few bastards out there, not to put too fine a point on it.

So I will sometimes fail.

Back to the world after ten days of silence 

I posted the message below on Facebook last Sunday. I wanted to put my feelings down while they were raw. Time inevitably anaesthetises, and I didn’t want to lose the impact of those morning hours. 

I’ve been out of all communication on a silent retreat in Herefordshire for ten days. (Why – another story and not for now!) I knew I’d be missing the American election but I had confidence. This morning a message from my daughter, Rozi, apologising for all the dreadful things that had happened in the world in my absence from it, concerned I might want to head back to my retreat and never come out again. That’s when I realised, 7.30 Sunday morning, that Trump had won.

Returning to the world after so long and so quiet away is emotional anyway. The Herefordshire countryside, the Black Mountains a high ridge out to the west, and the mist still lying in frosty fields, music on the radio… I was coping, just.

Back in Cranham – I learnt that Leonard Cohen has died. And that finally did bring out the tears.

I first sang Suzanne in a folk club in Oxford maybe fifty years ago, and I sang it again at an open mic evening just two week ago in Cranham. A few weeks before I’d sung That’s no way to say goodbye … And there was that wonderful radio programme recently about Marianne, and how they were in touch again shortly before she died.

‘It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah,’ in Cohen’s own words.

I and my generation have lost a hero. And there are new villains to fight. But there’s a new generation taking up the good fight and, thank God, my own children are out there among them.