Tag Archives: campaigning

We Need to Talk About Gaza

November 29, 2012 By in Activism Tags: , , , , , , , 59 Comments

I lost my temper on Twitter the other week.

It had been a long day on a delayed train. I was sat in a hotel room while DorkySon slept and DorkyDad was out at work, and I was whiling away the time online. On one tab, I had the Guardian live feed of events in Gaza, and on another tab I had Twitter, where it seemed like half the people I follow were getting all excited about I’m A Celebrity, and the other half were taking part in a sponsored discussion about Christmas presents.

What I should probably have done is turned the iPad off and gone to sleep, but I couldn’t. The rage had arrived.

‘Why are you all ignoring this?’ I tweeted.

‘Why is no-one talking about Gaza? What has to happen before we start paying attention to this? How many children have to be killed before we’re outraged?’

I ranted on for a while, before finally giving up and turning the lights out. Perhaps luckily, I then spent ten days offline while we were on holiday.

But the questions have been rumbling around in my mind ever since and I’ve been trying to find a way to write about them in more detail. It is hard. I have started this post several times and deleted it because what I’ve written doesn’t seem adequate. I have a deeply emotional response to the situation without having the extensive background knowledge to make every argument in as perfect and coherent a way as I would like.

Continue reading →

A New Direction

November 24, 2012 By in Guest Posts Tags: , , , , , 5 Comments

Today’s guest post is from Kirsty, who describes herself as a thirty-something wife and mother of one cheeky toddler. She blogs at damsonlane.com, and you can also find her on Facebook and Twitter.  

Restraint does not come easily to me. I have a major character flaw that means I often say aloud things that probably should remain unsaid. Recently I seem to be better at biting my tongue but in all honesty this is due to my post-baby lack of confidence, general exhaustion and a feeling that there are more important things in life, rather than a deliberate mission to behave myself.

In the last few weeks I have started to feel more like the younger, feistier me but my perspective has changed. I’ve found myself in situations where I would previously have got up on my soap box but instead I have consciously decided to take a deep breath and walk away. The younger me would think I’ve gone soft, that I am a push over and that I have no sense of social responsibility but my younger self never stopped to think that her outbursts were actually impetuous outrages which didn’t achieve anything other than making the individuals involved feel under verbal attack (but don’t tell my younger self that, she’d be really pissed off). Continue reading →

Arts Emergency

November 22, 2012 By in Activism, Guest Posts Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

Today’s guest post is from a small charity which I support called Arts Emergency. It was set up by the comedian Josie Long, and fundraiser Neil Griffiths, and I’m thrilled to give them the opportunity to explain a bit more about what they do and why. As well as all the info that’s on the website, you can keep up to date with their work on Twitter

Arts Emergency logo

The Arts Emergency: a generation of young people are being incentivised to disengage from humanistic study. Don’t stand for it.

It seems education as a whole is increasingly building for short term profit, and the skills we now champion are those that aid this through business and industry.

As we now know, in reality this has meant that academic disciplines caricatured as having no clear economic utility have had their public funding withdrawn entirely.

Yet those very subjects – the arts, the humanities and the social sciences in particular, are unquestionably vital to a diverse economy (the creative industries alone constitute nearly 10% of all enterprises in the UK, not to mention the fact more jobs than ever before require degree level qualifications to enter). Even seen through the relatively narrow ideological prism of those depreciating these skills and curiosities (of vital human importance) – it seems at best a counterintuitive act, at worst an act of deliberately gross cultural and social vandalism. Remember too we are suffering cuts in schools for music, and the closure of public libraries. Continue reading →

Biking for Babies

November 18, 2012 By in Guest Posts Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

So, can I introduce myself? I’m the Reverend Dougie Burnett, a minister with the United Reformed Church in Bristol. Next April with my two daughters, Isabella and Lucy, I shall be taking on the London to Paris bike ride for the charity PiggyBankKids.  This is in the way of seeking monies for our fundraising (we have pledged to raise £4500 between the three of us), but also to espouse the work of a very worthwhile charity.

Triathlon

If you’re a regular reader of DorkyMum you might have come across PiggyBankKids already. Remember the loose coins collection of a couple of months ago? OK, so we are talking the same charity. PiggyBankKids is all about changing children’s lives. Founded in 2002 by Sarah Brown it seeks to inspire professionals to continue their world-changing work in saving and transforming lives. This takes different shapes and forms in this country and around the world. First up is the Jennifer Brown Research Laboratory, based at the prestigious Queen’s Medical Research Institute in Edinburgh and is uniquely focused on both pregnancy and neonatal research. Next there are the partnership projects. From mentoring programmes to sports provision, children’s cancer care to school-based projects it is all there, with a particular focus on mentoring. Finally there is education for all. PiggyBankKids is expanding, taking their commitment to the most vulnerable children outside of the UK and into a global context. We have chosen to focus on the second of the Millenium Development Goals, set in 2000, in which the global community committed to universary primary education by 2015. Continue reading →