Talk

I took this picture yesterday. It was grey outside and I was looking for colour and found none. It's a little strange how sometimes my camera finds vivid colours where I never remember seeing them.

Suddenly on my computer things take on bright auras and for a split second I always wonder if I'm hallucinating. Maybe my camera's the real artist here.

I went to an all day dialogue about Afghanistan today and here are my thoughts:

1) we never should have gone there in the first place, but now that we're there pulling out rapidly will leave a vacuum, which won't be any better.

2) we need to be putting a ton more money into development of education, healthcare, self government, sustainable agriculture, infrastructure, etc. It's the only way we're going to make people like us and the only thing that will actually contribute to any sort of long-term stability. Otherwise we're dead in the water and should just pull out now. You can't bomb people into supporting you.

3) if, as the representative from CIDA said, we are actually accomplishing lots of really, really good stuff there like allowing 5 million more kids to go to school than previously, why aren't we hearing about it? All we ever hear about Afghanistan is dead bodies.

4) There is a critical lack of information out there with which people can make informed decisions. The media isn't doing a good job and neither is the government.

5) I thought the dialogue itself was too structured. The time constraints and only letting the experts talk meant that not a lot of people got to ask their questions and it wasn't really much of a dialogue.

No easy solutions to anything.