Crimperman.org

Broken doll photo by Goran Zec – CC:By-SA

I’ve been thinking about prayer and expectations lately. Yesterday our daughter came downstairs a bit upset. The cause of the worry was that she thought she had ruined her head forever. It took us a short while to figure out that she meant not her own head but one of those toy ones you apply “make-up” to. Quick tip: If you have a child with one of these – make sure they don’t apply face paint to it.

The interesting thing was that the words we said didn’t have as much effect as the actions we took

Almost on automatic pilot we went into standard comforting-parent mode. We started with “Oh don’t worry, it’ll be okay.”, skipped “It’s just a toy” and arrived at “Don’t worry we’ll look at it and sort it outi one way or another.”. You may recognise some of these from your own experience. The interesting thing for me was to see that from our daughter’s perspective the words we said didn’t have as much effect as the actions we took. All the promises in the world would not have convinced her it was actually going to be alright.

She is wise enough to know that sometimes toys are irrepairable but at that time what she needed was comfort, to be reassured that she was not in this alone. She needed a hug. She got that reassurance and – thanks to a can of WD-40 and a bit of elbow grease – it did turn out alright. Legendary Dad status confirmed but long before the fix she was calmer and reassured and you could tell – while worried – she was happier when she knew we were there for her.

How often do we we interact with God on a results basis?

How often do we interact with God on a results basis? We make requests and look for an outcome. There’s a whole industry within the church dedicated to this kind of thinking but even those of us who don’t subscribe to “blab it and grab it” will still often approach God expecting a fix. What if we approached him looking not for a fix but for reassurance that we will come through this. What if we remembered this covenant is not a service level agreement? Sometimes that reassurance comes from the angels – A.K.A. friends – God places around us, sometimes it may be a little more direct. Sometimes it will be fixed, sometimes it will be alright, sometimes it won’t be how we expected but we don’t need to go through it alone.

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Image by bamshad CC:By

Once upon a time a man – who turned out to be so much more than that – did something amazing and entirely unique. Before he did this thing he taught things which turned the way of thinking at that time on its head. After he did his amazing act he left his friends to become the vehicle through which his action and teachings would turn the world upside down. This was deliberate on his part because he wanted something to grow beyond himself. It took them a few days but shortly after he left, his friends started to tell others about him and what he had done. They began to share what he had taught them and to put it into practice. The world – as it was then and as it is now – was not really ready for this stuff but it got it anyway and then some of it really got it.

So began a movement which caught on like a virus and leaked across borders, under radar, crossed boundaries, leapt social structures and was as divisive as it was revolutionary. It broke the rules, ignored the social constructs and it began to change the world.

As time went on the movement grew too large for it to continue as it was. So it began to evolve. Not everyone agreed

As time went on the movement grew. It grew too large for it to continue as it was. So it began to evolve a structure. It began to develop rules to ensure this structure was the most helpful to everyone. Not everyone agreed with the rules and so the movement divided and fought among itself time and again. Eventually that division caused the movement to change. It became something that “we” owned – not that we were simply part of. It became something in and of itself that we sought to keep going. We had meetings, conferences and discussion after discussion about how it was to survive, what form it would take if it did and who would be included. We turned helpful reminders into ritual, guidance notes into canon and agreements into tantamount law.

Suddenly the movement had movement and life of its own. It still fragmented and divided the core structure always survived in all the fragments. There were wise people at the top, they made the decisions. There were even wiser people just below them – they advised on how to make those decisions and helped people to implement them and there was everyone else below who carried out those decisions and had to live with them. There were defined routes for promotion from the ranks and this was good because it enabled all various parts of the movement to continue and develop and grow.

Some people thought all the various parts did was develop and grow in the shape they already had. To those people this was not growth but expansion

Except that some people thought all that did was allow the various parts to develop and grow in the shape they already had. To those people this was not growth but expansion. So they tried – as many had before – to change the movement so it could grow and not just expand. The problem was the only model they had to do this in was the existing one and a large part of their efforts – like many before – ended up being absorbed into the core part of the movement and while eventually this did cause the movement to change, it still resembled how it looked for many centuries. On the face of this some called for radical change. Drastic measures which would – they felt – cause the movement to rediscover its radical, rule-breaking roots. But there were people in the movement who felt this was too much too soon. This was old ground for the movement and so it did what it had always done – divided, split and continued. Some parts of it argued with each other over which part really represented the movement but in general a lot of people carried on as before and so did the movement.

During all this time, the man that started the whole thing would take hold of one of the people in the movement and open their eyes to something which needed doing

During all this time, the man that started the whole thing would take hold of one of the people in the movement and open their eyes to something which needed doing. That person – often discouraged by others in the movement – would suddenly find themselves driven to do something to do the thing which needed doing. Sometimes others in the movement caught sight of this and joined in. Sometimes this action became an organised part of the movement and was absorbed into the structure and rules. Sometimes this took a long time. In all cases though the thing being done was “seen” by one person or maybe two or three and it was they who started doing it before any official name was assigned or rules were created.

And so the work was continuing all the time

And so the work which was started by the man at the beginning, continued by his friends and spread with the movement was continuing all the time. Amid all the division, discussion, theories in the movement. Despite any attempt to own and brand the work, it refused to be defined, to be described or to be marketed. One by one, person to person, conversation to conversation, meal to meal, hand to hand the man who started it all saw his work spread – just as he had always intended. No matter how many missions were created, no matter how many studies were made, no matter how many attempts were made to nail it down, the work – like life itself – broke out and then we started to see that – all along – it was the work not the movement which changed lives. It was the work, not the movement which broke the rules. It was the work, not the movement which changed the world. And it wasn’t the wise people at the top who did the work nor the wiser people in the middle. It wasn’t even the rest of the people. It was all of the people who did it. There was no special requirement, no training course, no length of service or special status to achieve before a person could do this work. All they needed was to see it, to hear it and to do it. Some of the work was easier to do within the movement’s structure and some of it wasn’t but little of it actually needed the movement for it to happen. In fact it was the other way around.

Nice story – so what?

In case I’ve messed up with my analogy. The man at the start is Jesus and the movement is what we call the Church.

There are too many discussions about whether the church will survive, how it will survive and how it can best do this is an ever changing world. In my experience all the ones I have seen discuss the wrong thing. All of them discus the survival of the movement – or their particular part of it. Few seem to consider the history of the work as done by individuals not a movement. Whenever something new is used to do the work of God, it is always turns out best when it is done by individuals. We don’t need Christian TV channels, we need TV makers who happen to be Christian, we need Christians who relate their faith to what they see on TV. We don’t need Church social media plans, we need individual Christians using social media and living out their faith-lives in that context. The work of God, began by Jesus and empowered by the Spirit will continue it as it always has done: one person at a time. The denominations, the individual congregations, the structures can all continue. the discussions, the flat out arguments and the division can continue. Historically these are less important to the continuing work of God than the chat you have to the person in the bus queue or the concern you show for a colleague, or the helping hand you give to a person who thinks everyone has forgotten them. We need to stop thinking about how this piece of work could revolutionise the Church and/or the world and think about how best it can change the world of the person in front of us and next to us.

So here’s the problem: As long as we confuse the work and the church as the same thing, we will always fall into the trap of assuming the work can only come from and through the movement

So here’s the problem: As long as we confuse the work and the church as the same thing, we will always fall into the trap of assuming the work can only come from and through the movement. When the opposite is true however, it’s risky. It means we have to stop waiting for someone else to tell us what to door how to do it and instead learn from their experiences while remembering those are not our experiences. It means we have to rethink our culture of thinking each type of work can only be done by those who are a) experts in it and b) usually paid to do it. There’s a place and scriptural principle for the movement to pay wages so somebody can dedicate a larger percentage of their focus to God’s work but it doesn’t mean the rest of us are off the hook. It also makes it easier to stop segmenting our lives into “spiritual” and “non-spiritual” because there’s no such division. Our faith becomes a liquid surrounding, encompassing and running through all our life not just a set of actions we do at set points in it. It doesn’t mean we have to be super-spiritual people who mention Jesus in every conversation. It doesn’t mean we have to walk around showing the world how to live by not actually living at all. It means we should allow God to open our eyes in any situation. It means we should allow our hearts to be driven by what he shows us. It means that instead of allowing ourselves to feel guilty about not having some ability or skill we should realise that the abilities God has used to further his work the most are listening, caring, asking and doing. All of this can and should be done within the context of fellowship within the Church but none of it requires the Church for it to happen. The Church will survive, it always has. The work will continue, it always has but lets move away from this unspoken fear that the latter can only happen when the former begets it.

In a month’s time many will celebrate what is sometimes called the birth of the Church. I will join them but I will remember that Pentecost wasn’t the birth of the movement, it was the start of the work. Which is far more important.

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Have a look at this great clip from Sesame Street (spot the Groucho Marx reference).

My name is Ryan. I am evangelical. It’s been many years since I tried to convert someone

A short while ago I was told I am very evangelical. This was not a reference to a political or theological stance (as the word Evangelical – note the capitalisation – appears to mean these days) but to the fact that when I find something I like or I think is good I won’t shut up about it. In this particular case they were referring to the way I enthused about my new ‘phone and other gadgets but as I thought about it I realised it’s something I do as a matter of course. When I discover something I think is good I tell others (as anyone who follows me on twitter will probably testify to). Movies,’phones, software, services, cable ties: I’ve noticed I have a habit of recommending to others the things I find good, useful or just plain fab.

I’ve noticed this trait in others too. Sometime ago I was at a party. One of the people there has Scottish heritage – specifically the west of Scotland. They are also a lover of Whisky. I don’t mean they drink too much I mean they are a connoisseur but not in a look-down-the-end-of-their-nose-at-you way. They not only knew how types of Whisky tasted or should best be poured and sipped but they knew about why that was. They explained why a certain kind of Whisky got its flavour from the water and preparation methods. They also managed to do this without being an anorak about it too. I think I have some lessons to learn there.

So what does this have to do with the video above?

I’ve noticed that too many “outreach” and mission projects I’ve seen in the church appear to take the approach Grover (he’s the non-frog) does in the video. He has something to sell and he is determined to sell it to Kermit regardless of whether it is suitable. It gets to the point where, rather than admit defeat, he changes Kermit to fit what he is selling. How many times have we done this is the church? How many times have we expected people to change before we let them have what we are selling? And we wonder why it proves unsuccessful or doesn’t last.

Every recommendation in life I have followed has been from someone I knew and trusted (or at least was trusted by someone I trust). They’ve been from people who have demonstrated rather than told me the appeals of the item in question. They’ve been from people who have allowed me to ask questions, allowed for the fact that my experience may not be what theirs is and – most importantly – have been prepared to admit the item is not perfect. Okay so we have a problem here when it comes to Christianity because traditionally we believe God is perfect so how do we marry that with being honest to people when we live out our faith in front of them? Perhaps we need to remember there is a difference between God and Christianity. God may be perfect, Christianity most certainly is not. For a start the very fact that we need to clarify what we mean by “Christianity” detracts from any “one faith fits all” message. Unless we are prepared to admit that what we believe may not fit another person we will never be honest about our own faith and it could well prove to be standing on a shaky foundation.

Catch something

The old adage says “Christianity is meant to be caught, not taught”. It’s pretty much spot on but we need to remember that not everyone is in a place where they want to catch anything just now and some will equate “catching” something with a virus which ends doing nasty things to you. Yet we talk about people catching the bug and we speak of viral videos. Not everything that catches on is bad for you.

I went to Spring Harvest this year and the theme focussed on being the gospel, saying the gospel and doing the gospel – as Jesus did. The interesting thing was that – considering many call Spring Harvest an Evangelical Christian event – the message wasn’t “Get out there and start knocking on doors”, it was more “Learn about Jesus, study your source, be prepared to show that in your life – with words as well as actions”. This resonated with me – as I hope you can see from above. I’m sorry if this disappoints but I can’t remember the last time I actively tried to “convert” someone. I’m not sure I ever want to. I’d rather live out my life in a way which befits what I believe and let people “catch” the bits which help move them in closer to God (for want of a better term). Both of those are moving targets and that’s the way it should be if you ask me.

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Image by C.G.P. Gray CC:By

As said, I was at Spring Harvest recently and spent some time in the Create Zone. One of the leaders of that zone was, the talented, Jo Dolby who – among other things – is a poet. Jo read some of her poetry including this one which I found really inspiring.

So I had a go myself – this is the result based on one of the themes of the event – Say: speaking the gospel to those around us. If I get a chance I’ll record myself speaking this.

Say

Say. Say the words that make it better.
Pressure’s on – every word, every letter
has to be just right, to shine the light
that changes live, opens eyes, that can make this person realise
just who you are, how much you care.
For if I don’t say them, how will they hear?
How will they know, where will they go?

But I can’t find the words that matter.
I stumble, I fumble – it’s all just chatter!
My words are weak, too simple, I blunder.
No depth, no breadth, no help? No wonder!
For who would find any hope at all
in a bunch of common words from a fool?

But that’s my language, these words are mine.
They’re all I have – those and my time.
And if all I can do is be myself, is that ok?
It’s not that hard to be who I am but are these
simple, stupid words I say enough
to change lives, open eyes to make a person realise
just who you are, how much you care?

Maybe they are. Is it true that even they – when used by you
could help someone find some hope, find the truth that helps me cope?
Say. Say the words that make it better?
I don’t know but does it matter? To say the words that encourage me,
these simple, stupid words, so free, could be enough, could be okay.
Could be the only words I need to say.

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I’m at Spring Harvest this week. As you may expect I tend to find myself in the ‘create zone’. Our challenge yesterday was to consider who/what Jesus is. Lots of great ideas came out. This is what I did.

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Grace – still amazing

Grace in action

Today I commuted to work by tube rather than by my usual motorbike. I picked up a free newspaper at the station and flicked through it on my journey. It was mostly the same-old, same-old mixture of “celebrity” gossip, sport with a bit of politics and maybe some world news thrown in.

Then on page 9 I saw the article shown on the right. It tells of how Mrs Patricia Machin forgave and campaigned for a lighter sentence for the man who ran over and killed her husband. I was amazed – so much so that I ripped the page out of the newspaper on the train and kept it (sorry if you picked up that paper afterwards). It put me in mind of Gordon Wilson whose daughter, Marie, was killed by the IRA bomb at Enniskillen in Northern Ireland in 1987. He described how he held his daughter’s hand as she lay dying in the street. In an interview shortly after he said:

“I have lost my daughter, but I bear no ill will . . . Dirty sort of talk is not going to bring her back to life . . . I don’t have an answer . . . But I know there has to be a plan. If I didn’t think that, I would commit suicide.” (Gordon Wilson 1987)

He went on to speak with the IRA to express his forgiveness of them personally in an attempt to create peace. This is well known. What many don’t know (or have forgotten) is that he was later shunned in the street and pretty much vilified for showing such grace and speaking of forgiveness.

For her part Mr Machin wrote to the judge saying:

“I have never had any angry or vengeful thoughts towards this young man”

The judge said:

“You have been very fortunate to be forgiven.”

In sharing the story of Mrs Machin’s forgiveness of the driver who killed her husband I have encountered a broad range of responses: ranging from “I’m not sure I could do that.” to “But that just sends the message that you can get away with it.”

Whatever else it’s good to see that grace not only exists but is still amazing and – by it’s very nature – shocking.

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There’s a new Crimpertoon out.

As ever, you are actively encouraged to download, use, copy and share this cartoon.

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Much of this is a reworking of an earlier blog post. I have rewritten it to address the proposed law change following the campaign I referred to earlier.

A parent will always be the best protection for a child on the Internet. Image CC:By-NC-SA OllieBray

The government is holding a consultation for a proposed new law which it says will protect children while using the internet. This proposal follows a campaign which I first came across in February 2012. It is called “SafetyNet” and is being run by Premier Christian Media and SaferMedia. The campaign and now the consultation is about requiring Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to “[block] pornography and other content at network level whilst giving adults a choice to ‘opt-in’ to this content”.

The campaign website and FAQ document are full of statistics which – as with any statistic – cannot really be argued with. These range from the percentage of UK households with internet access to how many children regularly access explicit images on their home computer. There are also a bunch of sound bite quotes to join the dots between these facts and the aims of the campaign.

The consultation is fairly loaded and appears based upon the “facts” purported by the campaign. As far as I am concerned facts are facts. If a USA survey i(take a single school by the way) says “1 in 3 10 year olds have accessed pornography online”, I’m not going to argue. I’m not altogether sure why 73% of UK households having internet access adds to the problem but I don’t doubt the figure is correct. What concerns me are the conclusions drawn and the way they are presented in the consultation document.

Perhaps I should introduce why I feel I can write about this. I am a UK Christian parent (so therefore fit neatly in the target demographic for the campaign), my children are between 5 and 9 years old and thus are well within the group the proposed law seeks to “protect”. I am also someone who works with and understands the “network level” Internet this consultation talks about. I have been building hosting webservers and websites since the mid 1990s and I still do. So I am fairly and squarley intarget demographic for the campaign, consultation and the proposed law. I would add I am also one of the people who understands the technology involved and by the sound of it I understand it better than those running the campaign or making the proposal.

Why this won’t work

The campaign calls for ISPs to “block pornography” at “network level”, the consultation expands this into two options. Firstly a universal switch which enables or disables blocking (or “filtering” if you prefer) for the internet connection and secondly an array of questions which apparently will allow the parent to decide which types of content are permitted or not permitted through the same connection. The wording is phrased as if this filtering can be decided on a per user basis rather than a per connection basis but the type of filtering they are describing cannot be managed in that way. In brief the type of filtering they are proposing (regardless of which option is used) is unworkable and dangerous. I’ll focus on pornography here because that is the main thrust of the campaign but the same points can be applied to other content types. Here is why…

How do you define “pornography”?

You can’t (as the campaign does) try to get away with a dictionary definition because we are dealing with parents here who may well have their own idea of what is appropriate for their child to view. Limiting it to just ‘the explicit representation of sexual activity’ may not be enough. As an example if that were all that was being blocked I still would need to check what my 8 year old was stumbling across on Google images at which point the “protection” is not coming from the blocking but from me (as it does now). Additionally who decides what content fits into what categiry and what level of “risk” there is? One parent may consider it perfectly aceptable for their child to see say a scantily clad woman in a provactive pose, another may not and yet both would expect such a filtering service to met their needs. It can’t. There is no part of the proposal which mentions fine tuning or configuration of the filters by the parent and to be honest if it did have such a feature I could not see many taking advatange of it because it would be what a friend of mine refers to a “too much of a faff”.

How do the ISPs determine what gets blocked?

Certain websites will be obvious by their name/domain but is the government really so naive as to expect the site owners to be scrupulous in what they call their websites? Also what of images and content provided through otherwise innocent websites? Google images for example has a safesearch option. Set that to “off” and your child will get a bit of surprise. But as the images are hosted and served by Google, the ISP cannot block them. So using the vaunted “network level” blocking, the explicit images can still be viewed. Other sites will be similar. In the end the only way for an ISP to properly block explicit content is to do it on an image-by-image, video-by-video basis. To do that they’d have to either rely of peer reviews which are inherently slow to react or they’d need to employ people to check and grade the content. Now I’m not an employement law expert but I’m pretty sure that an ISP employing somebody to view possibly illegal, often offensive and probably explicit material every day would be opening themselves up to legal consequences they could do without. Aside from that, given the constantly changing nature of world wide web content, this is something I cannot see any ISP being able to do properly. How long would it take before a parent brings an action against an ISP because their child was exposed to some piece of content which slipped through the filter?

Filtering does not work.

Anyone who uses filtering or blocking software will tell you that things slip through. Don’t believe me: how about your eMail spam filters? How about your anti-virus software? If they are so good why are you still suspicious of links in eMails you weren’t expecting? If you are not suspicious, you should be. Let’s look at Google images again. Google are huge, they dwarf any ISP by comparison and yet they still don’t guarantee that safesearch will hide all explicit or offensive images, they have a “report offensive images” link on their search results. If Google can’t make any guarantees how can I be sure an ISP would block everything?

Network level blocking means blocking sites and images before they get to your house. Such things already exist. I use a free (and very good) service called OpenDNS which – among others things – allows me to have it block websites that either declare themselves as “adult” or have been reported as such by other users of the service. Such sites are blocked before they even get down my phoneline. So this is pretty much what is being proposed here. It doesn’t work. Well that’s not true, it does work just not 100%. Google images is not blocked and other sites which have mixed content are not always blocked. If my daughter searches for “girls bedroom posters” on Google images with safesearch on “moderate” (the default setting by the way) she gets images which are possibly not what she was after. Filters can of course be too aggressive such as the one I heard of recently which blocked access to the Essex Radio website (and presumably Sussex and Middlesex too). Lord knows what it makes of Scunthorpe.

The point again is that even with Google images safesearch on strict and OpenDNS I still have to monitor what my children surf. The main “protection” for my children comes from me not any blocking software or service.

It’s all or nothing

The consultation allows for the fact that adults can request the ISP blocking is switched off either entirely or by specifying types of content. This sounds fine as long as all the adults use one connection and all the children use another. But that’s not how the world is. Those 73% of UK households with Internet access probably have a single main connection for each household. Many of them almost defnitely have a mixed range of ages using the Internet. So if a parent wants the blocking switched off, the child gets it switched off too. ISP blocking at “network level” is by defnition all-or-nothing. Now you may argue that parents should not be watching such content if they have kids. But I’ll wager they do and if they have the blocking turned off, the children the proposed law seeks to protect are no longer protected.

I’m not here to tell other adults what to do and by the sound of it the proposal doesn’t want to either but if an adult wants it turned off (and I doubt this would be something the ISP would want to keep switching on and off on an hourly basis) then it’s off for the kids and again the “protection” that should be provided by the blocking will have to be provided by the parent (as it should be now).

The consultation makes reference to filtering services supplied by mobile operators. The problem with this is that mobile internet connections are supplied to a single device, home internet connections are supplied to a single point (a hub or router) and this distributes it to a range of devices within the home. If you turn off filtering on a mobile device you disable it for that single device. If you disable it (or part of it) for a home Internet connection you do so for all devices and all users. So while it is entirely practical for a child’s phone to have fiiltering but the parent’s one to not have it, this is not practical or possible on an average home Internet connection as proposed here.

It gives a false sense of security to parents

You’ll have gathered by now that this is my main point. The campaign raises concerns which all parents whose children have Internet access should consider. But the solution offered by the proposed law and consultation is poorly thought through. As you have seen above, ISP blocking will still require a parent to monitor what their kids are surfing. This is good and I wholeheartedly agree that a parent/guardian is the best protection for children online. As parents we should be interested in what they are doing whether online or not. But what worries me is that this ISP blocking idea would cause a lot of parents to stop paying attention (or pay less of it) to what their children are doing online. It would give a false sense of security. Lets revisit the anti-virus analogy. Anyone running a Microsoft Windows PC should run anti-virus software, that is a given. But just having it there does not mean you will be “safe” from malware, phishing or other nasties. Ask anyone who supports Windows PCs and they will tell you that you are only as good as your last update and also just because you have software which the manufacturer promises will protect you (no matter how much you pay for it) you still have to be vigilant. It’s the same with blocking or filtering. The model is flawed. It does the best it can under the circumstances but it’s flawed.

It’s been suggested to me that I am not actually the type of parent this is aimed at. It’s a complement to be considered so and I know there are parents out there who do not pay attention to what their children are doing online. The problem is that if that is the target market aren’t they exactly the ones who will presume this filtering alleviates them of any further concern to their child’s online activity? Doesn’t that – in the terms set out by the campaign and consultation – put their children at greater risk? I’m not convinced that inadequate, unpractical and unworkable filtering is a solution. I’m not convinced that filtering is anything other than an assistance and even then if it is not voluntary introduced by the parent it is less likely they will fully understand it or implement it properly.

Oppose it

In the end, as shown above, ISP blocking would still require a parent to monitor/participate/be involved in their child’s online activity. That means the blocking is next to useless. Even if you presume it will help or do some of the job for you, you still run the significant risk that your child will find an image, video or site that you’d rather they didn’t. Sadly pornography is part of our culture and so is the Internet. But the Internet does not work like a TV, radio of a shelf of magazines in the newsagents. It’s different and it needs to be handled differently. As a Christian parent you might expect me to support this campaign but I just can’t. I do believe that my children should not be exposed to certain types of material until such a time as they are ready to understand it but I do not believe this is the way to achieve that.

The SafetyNet campaign might have the safety and protection of children at its heart but its using the wrong tactics. We do not need scaremongering, knee-jerk reactions based on shaky “evidence” and headline-grabbing phrasing. The government may use rhetoric which says it is trying to protect our children but the consultation is loaded and ill-thought out. Such a law, if passed, would not protect children any more than an 18 certificate on a DVD does. Educate parents, get them to speak to their kids, help them. Don’t make laws which would have a worse effect if passed.

Filtering, blocking and other such technologies can help a parent, but in the end, technology cannot protect our children, only we can. Such laws do not prevent children getting access to the filtered content (whether deliberately or by stumbling across it).

What can we do

The Open Rights Group has provided ways to write to your MP on this matter. In addition if you are a parent or business involved in Internet Services you can take part in the government consultation. The closing date for the consultation is 6 September 2012.

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Photo by thisreidwrites CC:By

When we speak of support,
when we speak of its benefit,
when we speak of prayer,
when we speak of what it gives,
when we speak of help,
when we speak of how it’s needed,
why do we speak of a one way street?

Does the flow of love not have any eddys?
Are those who help not also helped?
Do we overlook our need to support?
Do we forget the gain of giving?
Who was it who said we have to lose to gain?

Even if it is a one way street,
Can we afford not to give, to help, to support?

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Support, lean
Lean, support
Laugh, cry
Head up, head down
Arms surround

Give, receive
Encourage, wait
Listen, speak
Watch, hear
Holding up

Build, demolish
Step, stand
Hands together
Hands aloft
Standing beside

Sharing the glory
Facing the tragedy Conquering the adversity One step at a time
Together

Knowing you share this journey.
Priceless.

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