Make noise and you'll be heard!

It’s very easy to find ourselves watching atrocities blurt across our TV screens and remain immune to them, defeated by our inabilities. After all, ‘we can’t do anything about it’. Watching the media coverage of flight MH17 has had me screaming at the newspaper sites and the TV, frustrated and feeling hopeless. There simply HAS to be something that I can do.

Then I remembered what my father told me “make noise and you’ll be heard. It’s the squeaky door that gets cleaned.” He couldn’t be more right.

I was thinking about the flight last night. When we get on a plane, we sign a non-verbal agreement that we sub-consciously accept that this plane could crash. It’s the same agreement we sign when we get in a car, or on a roller coaster. We way up the odds, assess the risk of danger and then decide if it’s worth the risk – often the risk is so minor we rarely even think of it at all.

It is a complete abuse of trust, that the people on flight MH17 had no concept of the third danger. People on land shooting a missile at their aircraft. It’s difficult to comprehend, unfathomable even. How can we digest that? How can we ever way up the dangers when such an occurrence is completely unimaginable? Things like this only happen in Bruce Willis movies – right?  

I began to feel afraid, for this third danger I’d never comprehended. Then I realised that by allowing myself to feel nervous about flying, I would be allowing the terrorists to win – after all, by definition a terrorist is someone who creates a sense of mass panic and fear in the pursuit of political aims. 

When I woke up this morning, I was faced with a brutal and descriptive account of the crash site and the mistreatment of the victims. These victims were people, they were friends, families and loved ones. For us to dehumanise them, that would be the injustice! The reporter (Iain Birrell) described the body of a little girl, the photographs of a family with a new born baby (the camera had been looted) and even the unsanctioned removal of bodies by the supposed Russian government. Andrew Marr emphasised this saying, “what we’re seeing from the Russians is obfuscation and obstruction.” Sadly, I doubt anyone will ever be held accountable for such loss. But to focus on that would be missing the point, as Alexandra Anghel, the sister of a Canadian victim said “that won’t bring my brother back.” 

What we should all be fighting for here is dignity and respect for the people who boarded that flight. And yes, this is an emotionally charged blog entry because how can it not be? More than anything right now, I want those people to come home. To be reunited with their families. To be treated with love. Andrew Marr emphasised that this should be happening, after all “there is one party in the world who clearly has the ability to snap his fingers and it would be done and that is Vladimir Putin.”  

Whilst there is so little we can do, there is a lot our government can. They can place pressure on Putin who, in Cameron’s words, “must do more.” With the influence of David Cameron we can bring them home. That is why this morning I contacted the Prime Minister’s Office, wanting the reassurance that our government is representing the needs of its people and I urge you to do the same, if not only to show your support. The only thing we can do is use social media to put pressure on the government to act (hence the blog entry). Because, I can’t stand by and watch the news coverage anymore. 

If it were your friend, family member or loved one, you’d want the backing of the nation to help you bring your babies home. Hopefully with the British Governments assistance and their cooperation with other nations, all families can be reunited with their loved ones. 

Make noise and you’ll be heard. 

CONTACT THE PRIME MINISTERS OFFICE HERE: https://email.number10.gov.uk/

                

Love Lines 

                  Love lines your heart like a vein,                   

Wrapped around in disdain. 

I trace the blue rectangles on your hands

And watch the narrow paths descend. 

Love lines like a broken map;

A crossroad, that takes you off the track, 

Follow down the single strand,

Watch it stretch and disband…  

I feel you walking alongside me,

But parallel love lines, will never be.

Love lines are like a queue!

Because you love her, and I love you. 

Love is not a heart, a circle or wine,

Love is simply, a broken li-

The Walking Man

An orginal poem I wrote this afternoon called The Walking Man.

I fell in love with a walking man.  

He walked so far, he lost my hand.

He crossed the oceans and all the seas.  

He picked flowers, just for me!

He moved stars one by one

And then, when he was finally done,

He showed me the arrow in the sky

And told me that the birds could fly

Him to me,

As the arrow pointed to where he’d be.

I fell in love with a walking man.  

He skipped across the desert sand.

He let his heart take him where

His dreams could expand in the air.  

He carried on his way,

Meeting women, that couldn’t stay.  

The walking man grew lonely fast!

His walk continued, but he left his love in the past.

He saw the finish line upon a horizon,

The sun was melting all around him!

And then he saw I was standing there,

In amongst the warm sea air.

He reached out to hold me,  

Except between us stood a sea.  

Slowly I outstretched my limb,

But walking man could not swim.

The Night Witches

I am a story-teller. This week somebody said to me, that reading a good book is like “heroine for the soul”, I’ve never tried heroine (nor will I) but I imagine they can’t be wrong. The eagerness to flick through coffee-coloured pages can prove to have some addictive qualities. What I love most in the world (well, one of the things anyways), is when I stumble across a story that is entirely true. We’ve watched the movies that have made our hearts throb and felt a prickle of glistening tears when we see the final credit in big white letters say “based on a true story” and we go, ‘wow’.

This week I stumbled across a true account of WW2 that was very different to the ones I’d studied before. I’m willing to bet that 98% of people reading this do not know who ‘The Night Witches’ are, that’s okay, like I said, neither did I. However, this is a story too remarkable not to share. The Night Witches were the 46^th Night Bomber Aviation Regiment for the Soviet Air Forces. Let me break that down for you, because that title would go way over my head. Basically, they were pilots who bombed Germans at night, for the Russian version of the RAF during WW2. They were also, a team made up entirely of women. 

Germany had invaded Russia and the majority of men had been sent to fight on foreign fronts. Colonel Marina Raskova single-handedly bypassed her committee and personally asked Stalin to allow her to train and form a regiment made entirely from Russian women, who had previous aviation experience. The British refused to do it, the Americans refused to do it, Germans refused to do it. The global guidelines on this was pretty clear; woman and children must stay at home. Yet she made this communist totalitarian dictator believe that doing so, would prove that Russia was so confident that they would win this war, that they were not afraid to send women to defend their motherland. She was right.

The entire world laughed, including the Germans because of course, there’s no way an entire female regiment could defeat a male one. What I think Marina should have said to Stalin, was that the rest of the world should be scared because Russia was sending their women to war.  

The regiment had little at their disposal. They flew biplanes; a slow wooden plane used for crop dusting. They stripped them of all communications, parachutes, extra fuel, even then they could only carry six bombs and a single bullet (in case they were captured). They flew them low, at night with no lights, often gliding to their target and then dropping the bombs last minute. Germans claimed that they were like witches in the night and so they were nicknamed ‘The Night Witches’.  

They ‘flew over 23,000 sorties and are said to have dropped 3,000 tons of bombs. It was the most highly-decorated female unit in the Soviet Air Force, each pilot having flown over 800 missions by the end of the war and twenty-three having been awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union title. Thirty of its members died in combat.’

Reading about these female pilots, made me feel a great sense of pride. Pride to be a woman, pride that I don’t have to fight for my independence, that these days it’s a given for me, pride to know that there are and were females out there, completely kicking ass.

I’m not telling you this story because I’m an in-your-face feminist because frankly I haven’t researched feminism nearly enough to understand where I draw my line. I’m telling you because this was during a time when the world was screaming at a group of people that ‘they weren’t good enough’. And they (in this case the Russians) did it anyways. And they rocked. Perhaps it was sheer desperation on the Russians side, regardless, Marina saw an opportunity to help her country, to prove others wrong, and literally fly the flag not just for Russia but for women worldwide who have dreams bigger than their husbands. Dont ever let anyone tell you can't do something, go out and do it and do it better than anyone has before you.