All at the same time.
I discovered Laurie Anderson in 1983 when I was struggling to define who I was. I remember the discovery of her music as a high point in an otherwise shitty year. My father had been killed in a car accident three years previously, in September 1980. In hindsight I can see that the death of my father defined the next twenty years of my life.
Seventeen is such a nothing age to be, an in between age to be, an age to grow out of.
My son is nineteen and he is struggling and so I am struggling along with him.
He is as deep and as secret as I am. He and I offer up glimpses of ourselves, sparkly shiny glimpses then we shut down. We snatch those glimpses away and we hold them tight and we pretend that everything is okay.
When really nothing is okay. Everything is okay and nothing is okay and we are walking and falling at the same time.
We show our shiny surface to the world knowing that most people will never see past the reflections and we encourage that ignorance because really, what is the point?
I drive furiously into the city to answer his call to, “come and get me please mum,” I stop at the drive through to buy an ice cream because I know that I am too tired to be driving and the sugar will help.
I photograph the cars all lined up behind me and think, this is a metaphor, this is the real truth. This is who we have become.
Our Prime Minister publicly leers at a woman’s breasts and leads us on a path that I do not want to follow, that I refuse to follow.
I despair.
"Eye contact" Abbott. pic.twitter.com/GDShNdRPiL
— Jonathan Green (@GreenJ) November 13, 2013
What is this Australia I am living in? Who are these Australian people that loudly clamour for the most vulnerable people to be locked away.
And as I despair, The Anglican Parish of Gosford gives me hope.
Father Rod with his simple call for compassion gives me hope. I need hope, I need to believe that people are basically good otherwise what is the point?
I ask you what is the point? If we have become so cruel and so self interested that instead of helping people who come begging for assistance we lock them away and demonise them in order to, in order to what?
To allay our guilt? To hide them away so that we can continue on buying all the things and eating all the drivethrough icecreams as the planet burns?
We kick those weaker than ourselves into the gutter rather than bending down and helping them up.
The government uses clever language to trick the populace into following along with their Pacific Solution and I remind you that the Pacific Solution is wrong.
It is only a short sidestep from the Pacific Solution to a Final Solution
The language is wrong.
My words feel useless and I know that I am walking and falling at the same time.
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Frickin fabulous post Kim .
Love ya guts x
I love you as well Adriana 🙂 you are my friend x
I can’t bear to watch or read the news any more. I am ashamed of the country Australia is becoming. Or at least of our government. It’s just not right. None of it.
You are so not alone.
Hugs.
Our PM is a genuine embarrassment. Sigh.
I don’t believe the world is any worse than it ever was, sadly. I believe it was always thus. Sometimes, reading a very old book or watching an old movie I am surprised by just how modern their notions are. There is nothing new under the sun. What is truly, genuinely depressing to me is not that we are no worse than we ever were but that we are no fucking better. Will we ever learn to be more than savages? Or will our lizard brains continue to rule us while we couch our ugly deeds in high rhetoric?
I sometimes wonder if we had never invented language would things be more pleasant? The ugliness and hatefulness of words are everywhere. Yes, they can be beautiful and inspiring and uplifting – but sexism, misogyny, racism, classism, ageism all require words to help them flourish. Would people be more decent to one another if we could only communicate by looks and gestures? Probably not. We would probably just go back to clubbing one another instead.
Sorry, I have no real hope for humanity. If we manage to hang on by the skin of our teeth for the next few hundred years and make a great leap forward in evolution perhaps things will change. If we ditch the tribality, the need to kowtow to leaders, the need to conform to man-made social structures the constant, dreary competition, the desperate attribution of materialism to the point where most of us have more “stuff” than we could every usefully use in five lifetimes but still we buy more. If we start to understand that infinite expansion is not progress, that we are like yeast cells, reproducing until we drown in our own sugar. If we each find our ability to think for ourselves and not smash everyone down who disagrees with us. If men are able to let go of their sexist privileges and notions and the world we live in is no longer patriarchal. If we somehow ditch the fear of change, of difference, of one another and the desperate need so many have to control one another. Maybe then things will improve. Fat chance.
I sometimes try to imagine what that world would look like, and fail.
I do not exempt myself from my own contempt.
Well anyway, love to you and your son.
Thank you for these words.
I agree with what you say, however there are some people who really do need to be locked away, for their own safety and the safety of the general community. If they can be helped, then help them, if there is nothing that can be done, then at least keep them safe. If that means confinement, then that is the way it has to be.
Your words say what I feel. I cannot watch ‘him’ speak, I feel sick when he is on TV. I cannot believe our nation has put him in power.
I cannot believe the twitter and facebook feeds so filled with hate for other human beings who seek help, shelter, food a safe haven.
I just cannot believe …
We can only do what we can do, lets do *our* best xo