GREED

ABC Wednesday & more prompts below.
Have you had a go?

POLLY TICKS

Let me make something very clear. Greed is not bad. In order to
succeed both individually and as a society, we need to be stimulated.
Due to this, we have urges. Without them I doubt if humanity would
have advanced at all – and greed is one of those urges.

The problem comes in the
level of greed we display.

Be too greedy and we hurt both ourselves and society, so it’s a
matter of balance. Sadly, though, in today’s capitalism we have a
glorification of greed, with it getting out of control. This was not how
capitalism was meant to be, originally devised by Adam Smith as a
philosophy to go alongside thrift. We seem to have turned something
noble into a feeding trough.

Eye On the World
The ‘Y’ Files

BRIT NEWS: New guidelines
for schools say Heads must recruit
unqualified ‘minders’ for classes as teachers
are not to cover for absent colleagues. Which idiot
thought this up? Is it part of the growing planning on paper
without seeing what works in reality? Administrators should manage,
not dictate.

BRIT NEWS: The traditional pint beer glass has been decreed too
dangerous as it is often used in assaults. Oh dear, so are
fists. Let’s have them all chopped off! I hate this
mentality that, because a few do something
wrong, everyone must suffer.

RATTLER’S TALE

A Voyage of the Imagination

Carry On Tuesday
Heads or Tails – ReadWritePoem

YELLOW

Yellow streak ran down his spine?
Mellow, maybe, not cowardly kind;
Pleasant fellow, didn’t like a fuss,
Don’t bellow, he won’t cuss;
Many people don’t like woe,
They’re not yellow – be nice,
Just say hello

FUTILITY

Fiction: If only it hadn’t happened – the telephone ringing – three
times. Oh, the futility of it all. But isn’t it all futility in the dead of
night? They’d argued – over everything, but mainly his belief she had
a lover. I’d known he was in one of those moods and I’d intervened,
going to their flat. I found him in the lounge sulking – she was in the
bedroom – I could hear the sobs. Well, I’d calmed him, and it would
have been fine … until the phone call. He picked it up. Listened. A
voice said: ‘Hi, hon, I’ll come round tomorrow at ten if that’s ok.’ I
saw the shock on his face. I grabbed the phone – asked who the hell
it was. But by then his anger had boiled again. By the time I got into
the bedroom, it was all over, her eyes staring blankly into nowhere.
Oh, the futility – especially as it was a wrong number that started it.

STARCHILD

From soil to cosmos all is one,
From tribal chant to quantum song,
We are whole, we knew it’s true,
‘Til fractured living did imbue,
The idea that we’re all alone;
One day we’ll remember – atone

© Anthony North, August 2009