Post No. 588 - Reflections

A couple of days ago, a representative of the local Greens candidate came by to ask about our concerns. This was good, I considered, and gave my thoughts on what was important - which was environment first, then inequality and thirdly was education (in the sense of: more than the 3Rs"). I was appalled when she told me I was the first person to raise inequality - which would mean, more broadly, that I was the first person to raise social justice as an issue.

I was appalled, but not surprised.

The rate of discrimination I've encountered since coming her has been between 12 and 20 times higher than when I lived in Frankston, as I've mentioned previously. The higher discrimination here is partly the comfort of middle class people and their desire not to have those comfortable physical surrounds - which they wrongly think are the essential attribute of their "middle classness" - disturbed by anything - or anyone, in my case - who doesn't go along with the facade and superficial rules around appearance etc that they insist on.

That's part of it. The other part is trying to "outdo whites at their whiteness". That's the only way I can think of to put it, which is clumsy, and there is probably much better wording around, but it'll have to do for now. The phrase is about being more demonstrably part of a culture that one has come to by being more visibly extreme than others. A good example is a taxi driver who took me from the airport back to work a few months ago, who was, shall we say more strongly of the view that people attempting to come here should apply through proper channels and wait patiently for many, many years to be assessed, and that refugees should not fleeing to this country. That's offensive, wrong, and sad beyond measure.

There are some truly appalling "jokes" about this sort of attitude, things which I will not repeat here, but the area I'm currently living in is populated partly by the rich WASPs who are gentrifying it beyond others' reach, and partly by people who migrated here from Europe after World War Part Two - Italians, Greeks, Yugoslavs (as they were then described). They were subjected to the same sort of discrimination that has been handed out to each wave of migrants that has come to Australia since the white invasion in the late 1700s, the Irish in the early1800s, the Chinese in the mid 19th Century, Europeans in the mid 20th Century, Vietnamese in the 1970s after the fall of Saigon, and Africans more recently.

Some of this was written about humorously in the book published under the pseudonym "Nino Culotta", "They're a Weird Mob", but that doesn't really count, as far as I am concerned, as it was by someone not from that culture, who had an agenda of promoting assimilation despite the digs at Australian society. I think some of the 70s and 80s TV shows written and performed by children of those migrants used humour far more appropriately, and came to terms with that particular wave of immigration far more effectively - and people like Anh Do have been doing something similar for the Vietnamese wave of immigration.

It's sad that anything needs to be done to address the discrimination and lack of welcome shown to people new to Australia (so much for our mythology of being hospitable!), but where it does, humour can potentially be an effective tool, one that can also, sadly, be use to abuse and control people as well (Sue Lewis' work in the 90s at Swinburne University's National Centre for Gender and Cultural Diversity showed this, as a result of her research into the use that engineering students made of humour to control other engineering students).

I also treasure the introduction and advocacy for the concept of "multiculturalism", in the 1970s. Unfortunately, there was a backlash against that, ultimately leading to the evil of John Howard's government and its use of fear politics from the late 1990s.

Why?

Well, there are a whole range of reasons, but the reason I would like to touch upon here, is that of poor education / promotion / advocacy.

The thing about any attempts at education, is that it has to be accessible and understandable to the person being taught. There is little point trying to teach calculus to someone who is still struggling to learn their multiplication tables. There is a danger is teaching people who are too immature about negotiation, as t will lead to them being manipulative, just as there are dangers in teaching people about magick if they lack the appropriate character to prevent abuse of those skills. (There is also great danger, and sometimes evil, in underrating the capacity to understand of people who are young, such as assuming children will have problems with concepts that adults with a lifetime of socialisation struggle with - things such as the fluidity and range of gender identity.) These are principles of Balanced Positivity.

In terms of things like refugees, one of the things that I know as a result of having lived in a blue collar area like The Pines, is that many such people are struggling to make ends meet, and have little job security in their unskilled employment. They genuinely fear that refugees could take their jobs. It's is utterly bloody useless to make simple statements about that not being the case: refugee advocates need to get into those blue collar areas and find ways of presenting facts IN A WAY THAT IS CREDIBLE TO THOSE BLUE COLLAR WORKERS. Arguments that convince those advocates, who in my experience often tend to be middle class, are going to be utterly bloody useless.

There is evidence which shows that people with higher education tend to be less discriminatory (I can't be bothered looking up a link for that - research it yourself, if you wish). So, what do you do: give everyone a higher education? That would be nice, but would take decades, and isn't going to be likely given the current government's attempts to restrict higher education to the wealthy. The better solution is to ACKNOWLEDGE and UNDERSTAND the problem, and then ADJUST your methods so that they actually work.

If that had been done back in the 70s, maybe the backlash against multiculturalism would have been less severe, or even prevented.

If you cannot understand someone, you cannot hope to change them. Anyone who says "I don't know how anyone could do X" has jst shown themself to be utterly, utterly, useless at any attempt to change the person or situation, and they should simply get out of the way of those who can be effective.
 This is one of the reasons that the (unpaid * ) lobbying I did in the late 1990s was so heavily focused on education: we didn't want to lobby just one side of politics, and have the other side repeal the changes at any future change of government.We also used the feedback we were getting from our contacts in those parties to adjust or even stop our efforts when necessary, to make sure we were, as Gandhi puts it, fighting to change, not to punish. (Is that the ultimate case of evidence-based decision making? :) )

That's probably why the pragmatism of the philosophy of Balanced Positivity is so appealing to me.

Oh, one other small thought. The two main political parties have been claiming that their anti-refugee policies are really about saving lives at sea. Well, if that was so, they would have focused on honouring the SOLAS convention, not breaking it with the Tampa affair and further dishonouring Australia on multiple occasions thereafter - or they would have worked with Indonesia and other south-east Asian nations to manage the problem regionally, and fairly, and safely - as was done (eventually) in the 70s, after the problems that Vietnamese refugees were encountering with pirates etc became apparent.



 * I really regret that lobbying has come to mean "paid lobbying". I consider the word was a better description of what we did that activism, which is a word that has much broader connotations to me.

[1] BPLF = Balanced Positive (spiritual) Light Forces. See here and here for more on this.

[2] Please see here and my post "The Death of Wikipedia" for the reasons I now recommend caution when using Wikipedia. I'm also exploring use of h2g2, although that doesn't appear to be as extensive (h2g2 is intended - rather engagingly - to be the Earth edition of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy").

Love, light, hugs and blessings

Gnwmythr, Wéofodthegn 

(pronounced "new-MYTH-ear"; ... aka Bellatrix Lux? … Morinehtar? … Would-be drýicgan ... )

My "blogiography" (list of all posts and guide as to how to best use this site) is here, and my glossary/index is here.

I started this blog to cover karmic regression-rescue (see here and here), and it grew ... See here for my group mind project, here and here for my "Pagans for Peace" project (and join me at 9 PM on Sunday, wherever you are, to meditate for peace), and here for my bindrune kit-bag. I also strongly recommend learning how to flame, ground and shield, do alternate nostril breathing, work with colour, and see also here and be flexible. 

I am a Walker upon the Path of Balanced Positivity, seeking Spiritual Maturity.

• One size does NOT fit all.
• Don't be mediocre - seek to excel.
• Gnwmythr's Stropping Strap: Occam's Razor only works if  the simplest solution is actually recognised as being the simplest, rather than the one that best fits one's bigotries being labelled 'simplest'.
• Our entire life experience, with all the many wondrous and varied people, places and events in it, is too small a sample for statistical reliability about Life.
• May the world of commerce and business be recognised to be a servant, not a master, of the lives of people.
• Ban the dream interpretation industry!
• A home is for living in, not feeling, becoming or being rich or a “better” class than others.
• Being accustomed to interacting via certain rules makes those rules neither right nor universal.
• Like fire to the physical, emotions to the soul make a good servant, and a bad master.
• Expertise at intimacy and emotional happiness is generally not the same thing as spiritual growth.
• Any person, male or female, who has neither a serious health issue, dependents nor an agreement about study. yet expects their partner to work to support them, is, spiritually speaking, little more than a parasite.
• The means shape the end.
• BPLF restraint of uncooperatives is NOT an opportunity for revenge or getting even - even unconsciously.
• As words can kill, the right to freedom of speech comes with a DUTY to be as well-informed, objective and balanced as you can be.
• My favourite action movie of all time is "Gandhi", although I've recently come across "Invictus" and might put that one in to that category. However, I loathe the stereotypical action movie - and, for similar reasons, I loathe many dramas, which are often emotionally violent, more so in some cases than many war films.
• All of the above - and this blog - could be wrong, or subject to context, perspective, or state of spiritual evolution ...

Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger [people].

John F. Kennedy (who was quoting 19^th Century Episcopal Bishop Phillips Brooks)

Jesus loves you. Odin wants you to grow up.

(Facebook meme, according to John  Beckett)

We make our decisions. And then our decisions turn around and make us.

F.W. Boreham

Females, get over 'cute'. Get competent. Get trained. Get capable. Get over 'cute'. And those of you who are called Patty and Debby and Suzy, get over that. Because we use those names to infantalise females – we keep females in their 'little girl' state by the names we use for them. Get over it. If you want to be taken seriously, get serious.

Jane Elliott

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good [people] to do nothing.

(based on writing by) Edmund Burke

The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.

Albert Einstein

We didn't inherit the Earth from our ancestors, we only borrowed it from our children

Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product ... if we should judge America by that -- counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. ... Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile."

Robert F. Kennedy 1968

There are risks and costs to a program of action. But they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction.

John F. Kennedy

If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. … We need not wait to see what others do. (Often degraded to “Be the change you want to see in the world” – see here)

Gandhi

Tags: attitudes, Australia, Balanced Positivity, discrimination, dishonour, ethics, evolution, fear, governance, honour, politics, society, 

First published: Manudagr, 25^th August, 2014

Last edited (excluding fixing typo's and other minor matters): Monday, 25^th August, 2014