THE death of a young woman while walking home at night has produced a surge of protests, not just at the death itself, but at all acts of violence towards women.

Women understandably want to be free from the threat of violence.

The sad truth is that they are asking for the impossible.

Many years ago, a British philosopher summed up life as ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’.

I do wonder about the state of his liver when he produced this statement, but it is a reflection of the fact that we live in a world that is decidedly imperfect, and which contains, as well as the many wonderful people who have come to the fore during the current crisis, some particularly nasty and thoroughly evil people.

Ever since man first chose to disobey his Maker the world has been in a mess.

We may wish that it were not so, and work to try to correct some of the obvious faults, but to ask for a guarantee of safety in our broken world is to wish for the moon.

In pictures concerning the protests I saw a poster asking the question, ‘When will women be safe?’, and the sad answer is ‘Never this side of the end of the world’.

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While the world contains imperfect people, there can never be a guarantee of anyone’s safety.

In consequence, when our girls were teenagers, they were instructed never to attempt to walk home in the dark, and if there was a problem with their transport, I would always collect them.

Now I am in no way saying that anyone else is to blame in this terrible death apart from the murderer, but I am appealing for folk to exercise some common sense.

Because there are dishonest people around I would not leave a laptop on the back seat of an unlocked car in the centre of town.

Similarly, because there are evil people around, all of us should take this into account in whatever we do, and certainly try not to make ourselves vulnerable.

We need to live in the real world, not in the world as we would like it to be.

The one thing we can all do to improve the world that we live in is to begin to co-operate with our Maker, instead of rebelling against Him.

God bless you.

ALAN WRIGHT
Taunton