Monday 26 October 2015

Guy Fawkes Night...again

by Julie Sykes


 This started off as a post about Guy Fawkes Night. The annual event celebrated in Britain on 5th of November, to commemorate a failed terrorist attack that was planned to take place on 5th November 1605.

In short, a group of Catholics attempted to blow up the Houses of Parliament with the Protestant King, James 1, and his Government inside.

I was researching the facts - 36 barrels of gunpowder, the cellars of the Houses of Parliament, Catholics v Protestants, Robert Catesby, Guido Fawkes – and then I got to the bit where the plotters were arrested, tortured and executed.

Yep, tortured AND executed.

Two things struck me, then. Firstly neither side came out of this smelling of roses.

Secondly, doesn’t it all sound depressingly familiar?

One religious group fighting against another. Torture and execution. It's an age old problem that continues today along with slavery and discrimination.

Will we ever learn to live together in peace? Are humans destined to fight for supremacy?

Whatever your beliefs, whatever your race, gender, sexual orientation, hair colour or whatever, we all, every single one of us, have a fundamental thing in common. 

We are human.

And yes, we may be different in lots of other ways but surely that’s a good thing! No, actually it’s a GREAT thing. Being different helps us all to survive. It most certainly doesn’t make us better or right or superior to anyone else.

We don’t have to like everyone. I'd even go as far to say that it's practically impossible to like everyone. But wouldn’t it be BRILLIANT if we could look at a person and see just that… A PERSON not a religion, an ethnicity, a sexual orientation or whatever.

Nadiya caused a bit of a storm when she won Bake Off. It's all over the media with shouty headlines like, 'Veiled Muslim Woman.’And? Nadiya won Bake Off because she was a FANTASTIC baker. On top of that she was also kind and very entertaining. Congratulations Nadiya. You deserved to win. 

We’re all in this life together. In the scheme of things we’re not even here for that long.

See the person.

Accept that sometimes you have to agree to disagree.

Try much harder to be TOLERANT.

It’s not rocket science, which brings me back to Guy Fawkes Night. If you’re celebrating on November 5th then have fun.

Fireworks at the 2009 British Fireworks Championship in Plymouth.By Nilfanion (Own work) CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons







4 comments:

Lynne Benton said...

Bravo Julie! Well said - and very timely, too.

Nick Green said...

Nil desperandum: according to the data, things are looking up:

http://www.pri.org/stories/2014-09-29/world-actually-becoming-more-peaceful-believe-it-or-not

Unknown said...

Thanks Lynne.

Interesting article, Nick. Thanks for the link.

Susan Price said...

Poor Nadiya. She was caught up in a lot of anti-BBC propaganda because the Tories want to break up the Beeb and sell it off cheap to their friends - like the railways, and other state essentials.

They especially hate the Beeb because it will insist on reporting that some people think the Tories are doing a lousy job of running this country - though a top-class one of wrecking it.

So the Tory rags are working hard at portraying the BBC as somehow treacherous because it ahows a Muslim woman winning Bake-Off and because someone dared to disagree with the boiled egg who currently fronts the Tories.

All of which shows how true your post is, Julie - but, in answer to your question, no, we're never going to learn to live in peace so long as there's a chance that someone, somewhere, can profit from turning on their neighbours.