They're not 'their' children they're 'our children'.

A while ago, I wrote a post about western culture. It was called "Western culture is toxic and damages all of our lives". Here is a link. In it, I explored the way our culture actually harms people through patriarchy, misogyny, homophobia, racism, transphobia, criminalisation, othering of nature and many other factors. This post should be read in that context. But it's not just prejudice that damages us, it's the way we live our lives.

Recently we witnessed one of the horrors of the climate crisis. In Derna, Libya, horrific flooding led to many thousands of deaths after a storm and heavy rainfall. The flooding was exacerbated by the collapse of two dams. What most of the media failed to mention was that the infrastructure hadn't been maintained, and this was due in large part to the destruction of Libya by western powers. Libya, once one of the most affluent countries in Africa, is now one of the poorest - due to western interference. There's a lot of blood on the hands of western leaders.

One of the key features of western culture is the nuclear family. We live in small family units isolated from our neighbours. This weakens our communities and isolates many people. There are probably about 400 houses on my street. About a quarter of these are lived in by elderly couples or older individuals. The nuclear family weakens our communities and makes them less sociable and supportive. That doesn't mean there aren't good things happening in communities, but our communities could be much stronger if we lived collectively as other cultures such as indigenous peoples do.

In the Derna flood, many died, and hundreds of children were orphaned. The Guardian reported :

"Nawal Alghazal, a 62-year-old resident of Benghazi, has started a campaign to collect breastmilk from women already breastfeeding their own children and distribute it to children whose mothers are dead or missing.

“The least we can do for our country and the people in Derna is to take care of their children,” said Alghazal, who has taken 70 young children into her care since the disaster."

It's great that the local people are offering to support and care for these children, but maybe it's time we thought about them and other children people's children as 'our children'. We are social animals. We need to escape from the prison of the nuclear family and begin to learn to live together better. That is the one of the routes to building a better, fairer, more inclusive world.