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The psalms
provide an open window through which we can look upon the Psalmist's world,
the way he saw things: when in celebration, the things that signified
fullness of provision, elements of well-being.
What are, for the
Psalmist, these elements of well-being? Firstly, there are children - an
abundance of children. Then, there are crops, again in abundance. And then,
a means to peaceful living.
These three would
often be overlapping: such that children, for the Psalmist, are
olive-shoots; his wife is a vine, fruitful of many children; children in
abundance are a ready defence to the onslaughts of life, arrows to the
quiver.
Some of this - though
not quite all - passes us by in our Western world. Not so, in the yet
undeveloped world: where thinking follows closely upon the Psalmist's
thought. One has only to set foot in the undeveloped world to notice how
central are crops and children.
In Mauritius, for
example - relatively developed among its neighbours - the produce of the
land is of front-line importance. Here is sugarcane, the staple crop,
towering some 14 feet in the air, still cut by hand in large measure. The
men work with machetes, pitting their strength against mile upon mile of
endless cane - the work of slaves in earlier times. The women, for their
part, also in the fields - bent over to market gardening.
But it is in Africa
that one finds the Psalmist's position focused most clearly. Here,
plentiful crops give to plentiful children. If there are no crops, or they
cannot be sold, even the children that one has, at once are at risk to
disease and famine.
Cannot be sold? Now,
here is a difference from the Psalmist's world. The Psalmist's family worked
the land in a local setting, sold produce in local markets. Everything was
local. Competition was, solely, with one's next-door neighbour. It goes
without saying, there were not lavish imports in the local markets, nicely
packaged, with which to compete as best one may: surpluses dumped from a
world of subsidy back in Brussels and the United States. There they are,
now.
So we come to what
happened in Mexico last month. Subsidy in Europe and America would be
staying; tariffs on foods entering those areas, from poor countries, would
be staying. So there was no agreement. The developing countries could do
none other than fail to agree.
One has to understand
the enormous pressure to high standards of living in their countries that
prevented the EC and the United States from being generous in Mexico last
month. After all is said and done, which should it be? - voters jobs lost in
Europe and the States or death and despair, gigantic in scale, in faraway
places remote from the voters? What transpired gave answer.
How do I vote?: did
they give the right answer on my behalf? Or did they not?
We return to the
Psalmist pondering God's goodness in celebration. How shall we, who taste
that goodness in abundant measure, see our way?
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