Can the cake of peace be eaten with the tools of war? The house is a network. A canny partner spotted this place and saw the potential. The asbestos-ridden, grease-pit, “garage-workshop” has become a “Home Office/Studio” thirty metres from the house. The last piece of the puzzle was simply patching a wifi point into the forty metre ethernet cable. And it just worked! I know things are supposed to just work but I started a career being the guy who could crawl under desks and get printers to work in the 1980s. Things never work! Today they did. But I have to ask, how, why and for whom?
We have fibre from the street to the house and two wifi routers: one in the main house, and now one in the garage. A printer in the attic of the house (silly place, I know!) takes jobs from the garage/studio: from one wifi point, through the ethernet to another wifi point. I might nick the printer from the house. Plug it in down here and it would work just the same. I could do that. Who wants a printer in a bedroom?
Someone without a bedroom. Someone who sleeps with six children under a polythene tarp, adjacent to a war-zone. The “poor” needn’t “… always be among us.” And my dilemma is how to do my best in this world, with what I have? The better sages of the great traditions have a tendency to give up great wealth to follow greater truth. Am I a having-cake-and-eating-it kind of person? Am I beating my swords into ploughshares or just expanding the market for swords? Can the cake of peace be eaten with the tools of war?
