Yesterday I died

[What do you think of me
Are you quite proud of this make believe
Curtain that hangs around
Everything
Caught admiring that girl
She's so damn beautiful]

What's wrong with a parent that they'd call their own kid a fat piece of crap? What's wrong with the world and all its people that we blow each other up - over a tiny scrap of land nobody wants anyway?

What's wrong with the world that when one girl in a school says "I'm gonna starve myself so I'm thin and pretty!" all her dumb friends jump off the proverbial cliff after her like the lemmings they are? What's wrong with the world that boys expect girls to fit into a size zero because that's what they see on TV, when only two percent of the population is a guy's idea of beautiful? Why should the minority falsely represent the majority?

[Yesterday I died
Tomorrow's bleeding
I fall into your sunlight
Future's open wide
Beyond the leaving
There's no why, hope dies...]

Eighty percent of ten to fourteen year olds are unhappy with their bodies. Over twenty percent of those will try binging and purging at some point, and, scarily enough, ten percent will live with Anorexia Nervosa. So many people in so many different countries fall between the cracks. Why should any one person, beautiful in their own right, feel the need to deprive themselves of essential things just to fit in?

Why should teenagers commit suicide because that one boy or girl didn't like them? Why should they cut into their arms and drain the blood God gave them? Why should they have to feel as if they're so alone, nothing will save them?

I want to make a difference. But I'm one person. I'm one person in seven billion and I don't think I can do it alone. I don't think anybody I even know, here, in Victoria, is willing to stand up for what's right. They're not willing to stand up to a girl nobody likes anyway and say "why are you making that girl's life hell? Why are you doing this?" because then they'd stand out and being an outsider is bad. Right?

[All is lost
But hope remains
And this war's not over
Let me go
I will run
I will not be silenced]

Wrong.

God created us to be different. If He wanted us to be the same He would have created us that way, carbon copies of one another. But He didn't - he made us all, with love, individual, unique. Do I believe that some people are bad? Yes. But they weren't born bad. God entrusts us to look after one another.

And we're doing a pathetic job.

All you ever see in the papers is "diggers blown up in Iraqi terrorist storm!" over here. I don't know how to get it through people's thick skulls - WE'RE IN THEIR LAND. WE are invading THEM. Not the other way around. We've been fighting so long we've forgotten what we're fighting over!

[Don't wanna cry for you
But there's nothing left to do
So if it'll make me feel better
Then I'm gonna cry, cry for you]

When the Black Saturday fires blazed through Victoria last year, it was thought to be a natural disaster - until arson experts discovered that at least three people had been behind instigating the horrific fires. 173 people dead, burned in their homes. 414 injured. 2,030 houses were destroyed, and estimated 3,500 structures in total.

The fires affected 78 towns. It displaced 7,562 people. The fires burned at about 2,190 degrees fahrenheit. That's bloody hot.

I don't think a lot of people understand how DRY it is here, even other Australians who live up in Queensland or Ballarat where it's wet almost all year round, either due to humidity or rain and snow. I don't think they understand that wood here tends to combust if left outside too long.



This is Kinglake, a town 5 hours from Mildura. This is A YEAR after the fire.

How could anybody do something like that? Not only are they destroying towns and people, they're destroying God's plants and animals, destroying land that's been carefully cultivated for decades.

And they never caught the arsonists who did it either.

-a solitary blue.