farmdoc's blog post number 104

Thank God I’m a country boy. Where I live it’s so quiet that when birds fly over, you can hear their wings flap. I love the silence here. It lets me think. Concentrate. Ponder. Reflect. No noise to distract and irritate me. Unlike David Owen, the main character in the 2007 film Noise that I watched last weekend after darling Kate recommended it. David, played by Tim Robbins, is driven crazy by the noise in New York City. When he can’t stand it any longer, he becomes a vigilante (‘The Rectifier’) and takes revenge on the noisemakers. I empathise with him: whenever I go to Melbourne, what bothers me most is the noise. And whenever I return to Mole Creek, what I sense first is the hush. But silence is not to everyone's liking: Dan Gillerman, who since 2003 has been Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations, earlier this month gave his farewell speech to the Security Council. Turning his attention to the threat of terrorism, Gillerman said that he was most frightened by the ‘eerie silence of the Muslim world’ in the face of terrorism, and he expressed his hope to see a Muslim leader emerge that would say Enough is enough, what are we doing? I agree. The world can well do without that eerie silence. And the sooner the better.