funny how
biggles
But it’s not bigotry, it’s just smallotry, littlotry. What’s happening in Australia this week, laws being rewritten to accommodate cruelty, underlines the unease I have always felt about the sneering term ‘political correctness’, which seems to me to substitute rules for real empathy. Once the heart enlarges enough that other people’s humanness can be, must be welcomed, respected, gratefully loved, there’s no desire any more to ‘get away with’ demeaning jokes, excluding language, the mummifying pariah fire that dries the occluded heart. Andrew Bolt, Tony Abbott, look deeper, look closer to home.
2 comments on “biggles”
Leave a comment
You might also like to read:
Could our fear of brown-skinned asylum seekers with unfamiliar cultural origins actually be self-hatred? Years ago it was embarrassing in Australia to confess to "the taint" of convict ancestors. Then it came to carry a ...read more
Two men unfolded themselves and stood up. One of them grabbed my hand. I was passing in front of the crowded colourful stalls which sell Bob Marley t shirts and long Ghanaian dresses. They had ...read more
A man in front of me got up from his bench and ambled towards the train. He was huge and had that loping, awkward walk of a boy who's been called too big all of ...read more
For such men to be exhorted to look within is, sadly, a cry in the infinite darkness. These are hollow men, they have no core, no beliefs they hold dear. They are the product of their social programming and their need to be attended to. it is telling that Abbott left the seminary because he thought it was not as it should be. If the world does not conform to his view then the world is wrong. He lacks empathy because he is incapable of placing himself in another’s shoes or to see with another’s eyes or feel with another’s heart.
Bolt is a show pony with a very thin skin. He learnt early and so well that if he pushes his opinion it gets him more attention (and money) than if he did the job for which he was trained and reported the news. I swear that regardless of what outer wear he dons, underneath is a T-shirt screaming “It’s all about ME!”
The greatest sadness is in the fact that Australians are being encouraged to believe that lacking compassion and sensitivity is not only a “right” but that it is right. Progressive governments have spent a great deal of energy, time and money trying to convince our melting pot of a nation that tolerance is good for us and the opposite is bad. The current group of self-proclaimed “grown ups” are actively dismantling all the good work done before. In the extreme, it could lead to civil war.
For this to be true, Brendan, we would have to assume that both men are sociopaths or psychopaths, free from empathy and remorse and beyond reach. I imagine no psychiatrist has gotten close enough to either of them to find that out. But how horrifying if this is the case. Australia is not the only country whose current landscape is littered with unfeeling women and men. It seems to me the old guard of inherited or unfairly acquired wealth is clinging on by its fingernails, smelling the inevitable change – for all of us – in the wind; Gina Rinehart, whose response to inherited wealth is to exhort other people to work harder, and Andrew Forrest, who mines Indigenous lands but blocks an application to ‘desecrate’ his own, and Rupert Murdoch, who has made use of a media monopoly unprecedented in human history not to engage his communities in real conversation and debate, but to stifle discussion and impose his own terrified agenda, are in good (bad) company. My hope is that they are reachable, just deluded. It’s overwhelmingly sad to think you may well be right. I love the way you have expressed these ideas. But oh! I dearly hope you’re wrong.