Following the sad accidental death of cricketer Phillip Hughes in the Sheffield Shield this week, a simple tribute went via twitter - #putoutyourbats. Most Australian families have a cricket bat lying around somewhere and cricket in some form was a part of most boy's childhood. For me too, for some of the happiest memories I have are of cricket down at the park or up against the front garage door. I took a small cricket bat to Japan to show the kids an alternative to baseball.

The putoutyourbats is such a simple and beautiful tribute to Phil Hughes. It captures a mood of sadness at its essence and requires no words. Here's what Macksville Public School did today.

Rest in Peace Phillip Hughes.

Periodically, the poor and disadvantaged are singled out for special treatment. Through no fault of their own, they find themselves in receipt of tough medicine. Sometimes they starve to death, such as peasant farmers have done on numerous occasions in China. Others, through want of food resort to petty theft and are variously executed or transported vast distances to penal settlements, there to linger at the pleasure of a monarch. Many of the poor are located in dangerous or vulnerable circumstances and are often the first to suffer when war or natural disasters strike. So it isn't a lot of fun being poor. You tend to die younger and lead a much meaner existence than those better off.

Having got all this learnt though a copious historical recording, it is a wonder that the modern poor should continue to come in for unsolicited attention from politicians. The little that they do get in welfare payments (should they be unemployed) is made to feel like a lot. In fact, it is too much, according to this line of thinking, for it stifles the will to succeed and kills the will to independently thrive. Every so often a malingering exception is found (such as someone unfairly claiming multiple benefits) and this sets aflame the passionate fire of conservative thriftiness. It is a thriftiness who sibling is a punishing zealot.

I see the poorest of the poor in my work and I have yet to meet a person who didn't want to get out of their circumstances and do better. Often humble, even timid, they are usually just looking for a way to make ends meet - a difficult task indeed when their rents alone total a substantial part of their income. So I have little time for the cigar-smoking, self-congratulatory, full-bellied politicians and their erstwhile pundits in the media. They have no notion of going without, or having to make the choice between feeding their children, paying the power bill or keeping a roof over their head. The poor may always be with us but there seems to be no good reason to punish them over and over again.

I am coming to the conclusion that moaning about 'the youth of today' is universal. It crosses cultures and periods in time. At the moment I am reading China Witness by Xinran, a brilliant book about the fast diminishing and largely silent voices of the generation of Chinese who witnessed the major events of the 20th Century. Their lives are characterised by a lack of. A lack of food, decent shelter, proper sleep, security, choice, education and so forth. They have a surfeit though, of meaning, through a heightened sense of duty, commitment to a cause, the camaraderie of adversity, the idea of something greater than themselves and a huge work ethic. These kinds of stories are very apparent in the interviews that Xinran conducted in China Witness.

But even these kind, humble and resilient people fall for the 'the youth of today' syndrome. It is clear that, while they are often proud of the achievements of their own children, they nevertheless feel misunderstood and undervalued. If they told their stories to their children they would be ridiculed, they often report. Their kids are too busy getting a life and making money. Self, self, self.

More commonly in the West these days, the language is couched in terms of generational differences. Gen X are this and Gen Y, or Millenials are that. There follows a screed of faults that might be described as the 'usual suspects', with laziness, incompetence and selfishness heading up any list. Most reports are anecdotal, meaning that generalizations should not be drawn, though they are anyway. It has been ever so.

not-yet-summer heat
insouciant pen, jet stream
plying unstarred skies

I have an interest in American politics. It goes back to my late teens, when I used to devour Newsweeks and tune in to The Voice of America. Of course, teenagers should probably be doing other things, like hanging out with a wine cask in a dimly-lit room. There were lots of things I should have been doing, but alas, the ancient music of John Dowland and the poetry of John Keats kept me from them. And other things too, like tinkering with old Ford Cortinas or puttying-up geriatric rusted-out Valiants. Clapped-out cars kept me busy for such were the cars that I could afford.

But US politics filled a gap. My despair at the dismissal of the Whitlam Government meant I needed a surrogate and politics in our biggest ally was red meat, for the most part. I followed all the Presidential races from Carter on. I'm still doing that, and you can add the primaries too. These days I have the luxury of podcasts and online newspapers and commentary to fill out the details, for there is much commentary and considerable detail. There is an awful lot of everything, though it's pertinence is not always apparent.

Now, with the mid-terms in the US, the Republican Party has majorities in both houses in Congress. It's hard to know whether the party of Abe Lincoln will decide now to start governing or continue with their inexplicable Get Obama campaign. I can understand a conservative party being pro-enterprise and business-minded, fiscally-prudent and so forth, but I don't get the weird climate-denying, anti-government, Obama-is-a- Kenyan-Muslim bullshit. A little bit of it has caught on here too, as if being a conservative these days entails becoming an irrational nutcase as an adjunct to all the other more grounded signifiers.

It's important too. Look around the globe. We need Washington to function because the alternative is a policy vacuum, or something even less appealing.

I love space exploration. It's expensive and it can be argued that the money should be spent elsewhere, such as on poverty alleviation. There is a case to be made for that, just as there is case to be made for channeling defense spending in a similar direction.

Having said that, journeys into the (relative) unknown are inspiring. They touch in many people a sense that humans can achieve things that go beyond the squabble of Earthside troubles and the interminable cycles of the human condition.

So to launch a spacecraft at a speeding comet and then successfully land a probe (never mind the current difficulties) is remarkable. The scientists and technicians involved in the Rosetta/Philae project should be lauded in a similar way that the astronauts were in the Apollo project in the late 1960's.

It is sad then, when one of the chief scientists involved in this unique mission, should be humiliated at a moment that should have been one of praise and thanks. Dr Taylor's choice of Hawaiian shirts may be eccentric, but the bile and misplaced criticism by many fellow scientists is shameful. These kind of PC explosions are not in the interests of harmony or equality, and only strengthen those who genuinely oppose such ideas. The poor man simply had no idea, so maybe one of his peers could have kindly and privately pointed out his wardrobe malfunction.

Confucius prescience on this matter seems apt.

"When a wise man points at the moon, the imbecile examines the finger."

Russian tanks in Eastern Ukraine. Who'd have thought it? Surely the Minsk protocols for a ceasefire, which failed to stop an (illegal) election in the rebel-held provinces, the appointment of a 'Prime Minister' in said provinces, and the subsequent threat of retaliation by the Government in Kiev, could have nothing to do with it? Aside from my getting the subject and object of my sentence too far apart, weren't Western leaders ready for the inevitable Russian defense of it's rebel forces in the East? Maybe not.

There has been much talk of a renewed "Cold War" between Russia and the West. Obama was technically correct in claiming that the ideological differences are not the same as they were. Ditto the line up of states. Eastern Europe is now firmly in Nato's camp, which may be part of the problem.

It strikes me that Russia's behaviour resembles more closely that of a great power state from the 19th Century, than that of the former Soviet Union. Sending warships on the tails of its leader is classic gunboat diplomacy - just ask the British.

The West has mishandled the post-Soviet world badly, failing to grasp what Russia's strategic interests were, increasing the size of Nato (rather than dismantling it) and allowing itself to be played for a dupe by the canny Putin ever since. War is not a possibility, given Russia's nuclear arsenal. Some sort of new framework needs to be developed, one that necessarily includes Russia, if we are not to lurch from one crisis to the next.

I can't say that I remember much of either Anzac Day or Armistice Day as school events in my childhood. That is, I can't recall a single commemoration service at primary school or high school, though surely these must have been annually observed. Or were they?

In the 1960's, much of the steam had gone out of Anzac Day and I remember talk about it's disappearing or diminishing in the same way as Wattle Day had. But it seems that the passing of all the Gallipoli veterans and a new found nationalism (thanks Gough) has re-energised Anzac Day and established it as our de facto national day.

While the efforts of the Anzacs in their ill-conceived venture in the Dardenelles were genuinely remarkable, other battles seem to have been overlooked. Consider the Battle Of Amiens in August 1918, when Australian and Canadian infantry divisions supported by massed ranks of British tanks broke through the Hindenburg Line, advanced a dozen kilometres, took thousands of prisoners and demoralised the exhausted German army. Ludendorff called it "the black day of the German Army". Rommel, a young soldier in this conflict, though not at Amiens, vowed, "I'll see you at Tobruk" Or words to that effect.

So I guess that we are stuck with commemorating a military defeat. Not such a bad thing really. It's hard to develop a sense of hubris when you lose.

Recruitment Office 1914

The camera interrogates a crowd, lines
of faces that are bright, proud. Wide smiles announcing
the certainty of the times. Unapologetic
hats caught in mid-air, boaters, bowlers and
flat cloth-caps hang, jocular exclamations
before the yet-to-be. We see
men in rows on a threshold of dreams,
fleeing work, wives , a tedium of nows
flung aside for the game, the chance, a
glimpse of some luminous eternity
other than their own.
Lads jostling at the door, portal
for their newly-minted selves, trade
browns and greys for green, what is,
for what’s unseen.
Soon, the earth’s clamour
for bruised skin begins, the dive and mash
of jugular rend awakening.
Most, finding home, at last
in the field’s crowded chalk.
From joy to dust is not so far,
a hundred autumns past.

With the anniversary of The Great War upon us this year, I have been watching a lot of good TV (thanks History Channel) and reading a lot of material that touches upon the conflict. Some of it has only recently come to light. Photos from the period are also fascinating. The colourization of old footage from the trenches(and the resetting of the film speed) have humanized the conflict again. There is a lot of material extant for anyone with an interest beyond the predictably sentimental discourse of political leaders.

A few shots of Recruitment Offices in 1914 caught my eye on the weekend. I guess I remain surprised at the enthusiasm and bravura with which young men embraced the mad rush to war. Jumping into their Georgian shoes is no easy thing, for the times were much different to our own. Some things, of course, will always remain the same. Tomorrow, I will print a poem I wrote over the weekend which reflects on some the photos I have seen recently and for which, in advance, I offer an apology.

First day of November. 9am. Hot westerlies toss small branches and leaves through the already heated air. I have just finished some kick-boarding. The water at Lawson Pool is cool and the sky unblemished by cloud. Families gather at the shallow end to watch children take swimming classes. An aerobics class bobs in rhythm at the deep end to an old Beatles track, which has been looped over and over with no end in sight.

A large chopper hoves into view, its powerful engines sweeping away the gentle haven of Saturday morning pool sounds. It is an Elvis style fire-fighting helicopter. For a moment, people look upward, then back, though the meaning is clear. This is the price of living in the Blue Mountains.