What is it about Diamonds?

Gutter rats unite!
For me the idea of owning or 'digging' my life away in order to own the biggest most valuable diamond in the world, or any diamond for that matter is a complete anathema. I cannot for the life of me understand what it's all about. A lump of carbon, large or small, that can do nothing more than twinkle in the light is valued very highly. True, the poor ones that are not good enough to sit on a ring or on another lush piece of jewelery can cut glass, that's not what I am talking about, it's the sheer cruelty and brutality involved in the production of set diamonds, from recruiting of workers to digging, smuggling, preparing and selling to the ostentatiousness of the wearer that makes me choke.
As you have probaly guessed I have just seen the movie 'Blood Diamonds'. My son bought it for me on DVD for my birthday last month, and I am just getting round to watching it. Of course the movie is Hollywood-ised, but it makes one sick to think of the exploitation of the poor in order to make the richly dressed gutter rats of the western companys who deal in such tainted merchandise, behave in the way they do.

What is a life worth?
It is incredible how we humans have made what is worthless so full of worth, and how we have used what is eternally valuable and made it something that is disposable and worthless. I mean of course the battle between human life and dignity and a lump of carbon deposit.
The setting for the movie is of course the vast and untamed continent of Africa. It seems that with all of its horrors and brutality that we never see Africa cry. It is a brave continent of people that takes whatever is thrown at it and moves along silently and colourfully, bent by the poverty and pain but unyielding to the continual 'usesge' of the powerful. The movie captures wonderfully the values of the African, family, friendship and forgiveness and so eloquently describes in pictures and of course words the values of the rich, financial gain at all costs.
I have presented my wife with three rings in our almost 29 years of marriage. All three as a mark of how I esteem her and love her. I like the idea of using something that is deemed to be valuable as a means of communicating these thoughts. I am however challenged with regard to how I am now implicated in the chain of wrong that has followed these 'precious' stones on to my wife's fingers.

What's wrong with it all?
The wrong of course is not that something is deemed valuable per se but the immense wealth that is created at the expense of the very poor. How can it ever be justified, that a young lad, or a man of any age for that matter, works 'drowning' in a sea of muddy water looking for a splinter of this compressed carbon, eating and sleeping in awful conditions and left to die if sickness overcomes his exhausted frame, and as a result is able to send a pittance back to support his family whilst the seller on a rich street in Europe or America, languishing in his gilted car, dining on the very best of fare and is able to take his family off on holidays the cost of which would feed the 'digger' for a century. There is something wrong with this picture. I am not a communist but for centuries we have bemoaned the fact that as the rich get richer the poor get poorer, this should not be and we need to do something about it. The terrifying fact is that most of the diamonds mined are kept off the market in order that the price of those on the market is kept high. Not only is the digger being seriously shafted but the person in final receipt of the stones is shafted as well.