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Most mornings when I approach my blog I know what I want to say. Other times I sit with too many ideas, unable to fix on one single thing. Perhaps it is those times that reveal, not so much a lack of discipline or forethought, but a fluidity of the mind that insists on floating around - my eyes dart here and there, rest on a small blue cardboard box I've had for years. It contains approximately 550 pieces (15 X 15 cm) of perfectly cut colored squares for use in origami - made in Japan. The cover of the box depicts two beautifully paper folded flowers, pink and yellow, purple and blue, with green paper leaves underneath. The box sits in an opened cupboard on top of a book called 'Origami: Paper Folding for Fun'. I bought the book about twenty-five years ago. So why this focus, today? I often look at the box of paper with 50 different colored squares and think that I should do something with it, perhaps get 550 people to make origami peace cranes and hang them on a tree. That would be lovely - but does anyone really have the time or inclination to do something as time consuming as intricately folding paper? There's a lovely Japanese saying that 'one who folded 1,000 cranes would be granted a wish'. Sadako Sasaki who suffered from leukemia after an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 believed this to be true and folded 1,000 cranes before her eventual death in 1955. The first time that I became aware of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was at school in 1966. We had been asked to precise a piece of writing. I read the piece and then, quite distressed, I asked the teacher if this was true or just a story. When she told me that it was true I burst into tears and ran out of the room. It was just too much to bear. Everyday we are exposed to violent events (real and imaginary) that tend to desensitize us to the pain and misery of others. Last night as I watched footage of ' US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad -- including two Reuters news staff', on the ABC television program Hungry Beast (See: video at http://wikileaks.org/. I began to think about how events like these appear so unreal, so distant, like footage and photographs of the aftermath of the atomic bombs dropped by America in 1945 or shots of the planes hitting the Twin Towers in NYC on September 11, 2001. I'm wondering if children or teenagers today would be as affected as I was when I first read about WW2 or are many of them already anesthetized - deadened to gun-shot and knife wounds, destruction, decapitation, death, decomposition. Is violence today expected and commonplace? It's difficult to avoid. On Tuesday I saw The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Niels Arden Oplev, 2009) it's an incredibly violent film, which includes two rape scenes (a man who bashes, shackles and rapes a woman and that same woman raping her aggressor with a vibrator), but it's no violent than many other films that have been produced in the past decade. Real violence, such as images of those innocents gunned down by the US military looks somehow tame compared to the violence depicted in films. Could this be why we no longer appear to react so vehemently to these events? Our inhumanity to others has become just another piece of content to view on YouTube. OK, I've put the little box of many colors away. It will just sit there. Perhaps it will always remain just an object to ponder.