David and Goliath Revisited

There is an interesting piece in the UK Guardian newspaper today describing how the source of the biblical Goliath's size and strength could well have been a serious medical condition called acromegaly, a disease caused by a benign tumour of the pituitary gland. One of the common side-effects of acromegaly is vision problems.

Thus, the Israelites saw an intimidating giant, but the very thing that gave the giant his size was also the source of a great weakness. Malcolm Gladwell in the Guardian, goes on to observe that there is an important lesson for battles with all kinds of giants. The powerful and the strong are not always what they seem.

The successful Davids of this world don't play by the rules expected by the Goliaths. Colin Barnett expected the community ('the little people' as he probably calls us, with scarcely-disguised disdain - not to mention unintended irony) to get so caught up in the many non-sensical details of the proposals for local government changes and his broken promise of 'no forced amalgamations' that we would have neither the energy nor the resources to convert our anger at his proposed perversion of the democratic process into effective action.

What the emperor failed (and still fails) to grasp is that there are literally thousands of us out there who will sling the stones that will fell his grand designs. He has to hold most of the Liberal parliamentarians to his side, whereas we only have to get a few of them to support the democratic rights of their electors - and hence their chances at the next election.

The stones that we sling will be logical arguments made fiery by anger and indignation.

And we all know what happened to Goliath after he was felled by David's stone, don't we!