Joanne McNeill: Getting on in global village

Joanne McNeill

For anyone who cannot abide cop shows, gritty food contests or sport of any description the arrival of the romantic television comedy series 800 Words - widowed columnist from Sydney moves to a fictional West Coast town with his two children to start a new life by a nostalgic beach - is sweet relief.

The idyll is shattered when the columnist unwisely describes the place as a "dead-end town" in print.

Vested interests, offence taken, officious bureaucracies, jealousies, vendettas, witch hunts, septic tank issues, idiots, eccentrics, gorgeous scenery ... so goes the everyday grist of life in the village, but we can tell already that all will end well.

Our hero will charm the community, fall happily in love with a luscious local and eventually acquire a working indoor flush toilet ... or learn to love the long drop. Sigh!

Of course in real life nobody takes that much notice of columnists, love and plumbing remain ongoing challenges, and even word-counts are trickier.

When I started "columnising" pre-digitally many editors ago, 750 words were specified. Back then it was a matter of counting words by eye, a diabolical process which often took longer than the writing.

Word Count is the single best innovation of the computer age, but working out just how many words are required is still problematical as page layouts change.

Although my natural inclination is to rave on up garden paths into the thousands, I try to kill all my darlings and err on the side of brevity because offering too much only leaves power over omissions in others' hands, thus I have settled arbitrarily on 533 words, give or take a silver bell or cockle shell.

The village, however, remains a microcosm. The only way to live in it peacefully is to realise that people who hold wildly differing viewpoints can still be amicable neighbours.

Doing unto others as you wish to be done is just as handy in the global village where the recent history of state military might pursuing commercial, strategic and political interests via slaughter on foreign soil was never going to end well.

The imposition of the state of Israel on Palestinian land and decades of Western military intervention in the Middle East have led directly to the new form of warfare known as terrorism. What goes around comes around. If indeed disaffected followers of Muslim extremism are responsible for recent indiscriminate slaughter of innocent civilians in Lebanon and Paris - as opposed to focusing on traditional targets such as politicians who lavish high security measures on their own august persons - it is because this effective weapon was cleverly identified after it rained down upon their own homes and families. It has made the blundering machinery of historical state warfare redundant, capable only of locking stable doors after nightmares have bolted.

Now is not the time to sing bloody anthems, wave flags, rise up in patriotic fervour against generic enemies, or to ramp up security and military offensives. If we want a happy ending in the global village, it is time to lay down arms, bring troops home, make amends, invest equitably in the well-being of all, fix the bombed-out plumbing and try to get along.