The military/industrial complex celebrates as militarization of society is very near complete

The militarization of society nears completion.

Police officers all around the world look
increasingly like armed soldiers.

And, it seems, the only thing that can "rescue" us from this ugly realization is climate change.

That, however, is demonstrably false for rather than turn to collaboration and co-operation that will enable us to avoid the worst of what a disrupted climate will bring, our first resort will be the only thing we know, confrontation and violence.

That is exampled by many things, among them the increasing armed forces-like appearance of those responsible for ensuring we adhere to the rather simple laws of a civil society.

People of all stripes from all parts of the world have said, with facts being the only provocation, climate change is the greatest security threat that humanity has ever faced, worse even than the two great conflagrations of the 20th Century that killed millions and dislocated the lives of even more.

Climate change has been on and off the agenda, political and otherwise, for some 50 years and yet nothing has effectively been done rather, we procrastinate and prevaricate and some find comfort in arguments that the science is not yet conclusive.

Behaviours remain largely untouched and the peace of mind of most is not disturbed even though clear evidence illustrates that this century, certainly the latter decades are going to be difficult, if not impossible.

The contradictions are astounding; climate change is the greatest physical threat humanity has ever faced and yet many, closeted in their modern-day comforts, argue the change is not human-induced.

It clearly is, but climate change is frequently denied, considered someone else’s problem simply awaiting a technological solution and although it advances slowly, that’s in human terms, but with lightning speed geologically, and beyond inexplicable changes (to the ordinary man) to our weather, nothing appears to be happening.

Bill Kelly (right) and Juris Greste at the launch of
Bill art exhibition at Melbourne's MARS Gallery.

Terrorism in its many forms is clearly more visible and unlike climate change, has an identifiable enemy and living lives soaked in violence, we know how to respond as exampled by Great Britain’s reaction to what is presently happening in Syria – a day of lively discussion in England’s parliament resulted in a decision to bomb the terrorists and just six hours later English bombs were reigning down on supposed terrorist buildings, not doubt killing many innocent people as well.

As mentioned earlier climate change has been an “off and on” discussion for some 50 years and no one has yet done anything near as decisive as bombing.

Addressing climate change demands something quite different and just a few weeks ago Nathalia’s Peace, one of the world’s great peace advocates, claimed that peace is the primary avenue through which climate change can be addressed.

Peace, he said, is about caring, co-operation and collaboration and not about the destruction epitomized by the militarization of our society; violence manifesting itself as a dangerously disrupted climate system.

Incongruous court building will disrupt village-like atmosphere

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alling Shepparton a “village” maybe considered blasphemous.

However, a village is nothing but a conglomeration of people and the supporting infrastructure upon which they depend for daily living, and that is pretty much what Shepparton is.

An artist's impression of Shepparton's
proposed new courthouse - it will be
rather incongruous in the city's
village-like atmosphere.

It just so happens that more people have decided to settle in Shepparton than in any other nearby urban area and so grasping at whatever it is that will boost egos our village is now labelled a “city”.

Does that make any difference? Officially probably, but if we dare take it too literally, it can distort our understanding of what is and isn’t important in our village.

All urban areas have a heart and Shepparton’s has historically been the central business district presently centred on the Maude St Mall and its immediate surrounds.

Commerciality has driven a retail diaspora resulting in the creation of major shopping centres on the city’s fringes, effectively driving a dagger through the city’s heart.

Wounded, the city limps on, hindered by an administration which sees solutions through a dated 20^th Century prism that allows only visions reliant upon ideas built around a fossil fuel-based economy.

Shepparton, and those who live here, need and deserve better; they deserve innovative, bold and adventurous planning that will ready the village for a future in which water reliability will be threatened and its fellow “lifeblood”, oil will also be increasingly scarce becoming largely the province of the few.

Our village once had a human-scale, evolving from times when energy was scarce in that it was mostly human and animal, but then progress came along and in just few decades we were being whisked around the Goulburn Valley in steam trains and motor vehicles initiating the social erosion that continues today.

Our communities have become socially shredded as the insisted individualism of the corporatized world drives aspirational wedges between us as we pursue various goals bringing on a perceived and practical inequality.

A manifestation of that inequality, the collapse of values that bind a community, is the plan to build an incongruous court house in the heart of our village that is clearly out of step with the human-scale of its surrounds.

Member for Shepparton, Suzanna Sheed, herself a lawyer, correctly points out that the building will be more than somewhere to dispense the law for it will also be the focus for a host of social services processes that are presently sprinkled throughout the city.

That being the case, what is proposed appears to be a distorted effort to contain blustering egos within a limited footprint and so the building has gone up rather than out, disrupting and destroying Shepparton’s beautiful low-rise skyline.

The preservation of Shepparton’s village-like atmosphere is too important to sacrifice to such economic callousness and so rather than the proposed glass-like shrine to vanity, we should be acquiring more property and building a low-rise complex that reflects the human-scale of our village.  

Yes, it's time to 'scare the horses'

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t’s time to “scare the horses”.

A more than a decade of reading about and listening to some of the world’s best minds and understanding the damage you and I, and our fellows are doing and have done to earth’s atmosphere, the constant, although subtle, message has been not to scare the horses.

Yes, It's time to scare the horses.

Okay, but what does that mean?

The facts about climate change, indisputable and illustrated beyond debate by the world’s scientific community, are so contrary to life that to articulate them, as we must if we are to emerge intact from this dilemma, would freeze people into inaction.

Many have warned of that freeze, along with caveat that many “lectured” to about their behaviour, re-double their resistance, become angry,  even more remote from reason and so increasingly determined to adhere to behaviours that are worsening our troubles and align themselves, emotionally and physically, with values contrary to what the world needs.

Circumstances that manifested themselves in two world wars most certainly scared the horses and although the responses were varied, people, although frightened, unsure and uncertain, broadly and generally responded with a commitment that saw sweeping transformations in behaviour preparing communities around the world for the privations, destruction, costs and deaths of war.

Climate change demands an even more disciplined approach, but unlike a war there is no obvious adversary and so while some are scared and confused, a small, but powerful and massively influential minority whose power and influence rest in maintenance of the status quo, continue to laud what exists and encourage more of the same.

As convincing and as populist as their arguments might sound, they are false and beyond that, what is proposed for United Nations climate talks in Paris later this year can be shown as insufficient to put the world on a path to repair.

Preparations for war illustrated the amazing innovative, inventive and can do nature of people and within that their adaptability, which has taken humans to the top of the food chain, as we stood together to confront a common enemy.

Having a clear understanding of who and where the enemy was simplified affairs as it gave people a focus; somewhere and something upon which to vent their frustrations, fears and anger.

Climate change is a more complex, convoluted and wicked problem as the enemy is “us”, making it difficult and confusing, and somewhat impossible, to be angry with yourself and along with that put yourself, your family and friends, and in fact the whole of society of which you are an active part, in the “enemy” category.

So rather than bolt about like scared horses and be angry and irrational, we need to understand and accept we were wrong, we made a mistake and although time is scarce, we need to bond on a war-like footing, make bold decisions, take equally bold actions and make the great escape.

Roaming brings many benefits both to individuals and communities

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iding a bike was a skill learnt in the historic-fog of personal history.

Professor Trevor Hancock used
this image to illustrate the
advantages to a community
of "roaming" - advantages
now largely lost.

That relatively simple skill brought many bonuses and chief among them was freedom.

Suddenly the world was my oyster (well, the geographical wilds of Echuca east at least) and I was free to roam, pretty much at will.

That wonderful freedom allowed to myself and my friends was not considered much until recently when a Canada’s Professor Trevor Hancock talked about how stronger, resilient and healthier communities were when kids had the freedom to roam.

That roaming, he explained unintentionally informed kids about their community in that they got to know a variety of people, understand how it worked, its strengths, weaknesses and along with that understood and learnt much about themselves, all things that enriched them personally and aligned them, ultimately with the unstated aims of their community.

A pictorial image illustrated clearly how our roaming has been reduced to almost nil as the decades have passed taking with it an almost inexplicable sense of community that arose from kids roaming about the place.

The image illustrated that a kid of today could roam, unaccompanied, about 300 metres from his home; his mother less than a kilometre; his grandfather nearly two kilometres and his great grandfather regularly roamed about 10 kilometres to go fishing.

The visiting professor lamented the loss of roaming and was able to equate it with the decline in the broader wellbeing of community, suggesting that it illustrated, in a practical sense, our personal disconnect with nature.

Humans are unquestionably a part of nature and have long and rich history of being a part of it, until modernity really took hold.

Professor Trevor Hancock - he extolls the
community benefits of "roaming".

Humans have been hand-in-glove with nature for most of their existence, and many still are, but as Professor Hancock pointed out, we now spend 80 per cent of our time in a building, and so disconnected from nature, and of the other 10 per cent, half of that is spent inside a vehicle..

That disconnect from nature is now almost total and what is happening in the world indicates that such remoteness is bringing unintended consequences – we are almost absolutely insensitive to the impact our behaviour is having on earth’s climate system.

Roaming, of course is not the solution, rather just a small part of it.

The almost incommunicable health roaming brought to our communities appears to be lost forever as most people, reacting to the few stories given broad coverage in our popular media about isolated violent behaviour keep their children pretty much within reach, killing off their natural adventurous spirit.

Learning to ride a bike was about freedom and primed my willingness to engage with the other, a desire still with me today.

We need to look 'up-river' if we are to resolve domestic violence

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Australia's PM, Malcolm Turnbull - he
sees the solution to domestic violence
 in a "rich spend", while it
is really an 'up-river' problem.

omestic violence is an “up-river” problem.



Malcolm Turnbull’s plan to spend richly to slow what is mostly men attacking women and the “up-river” theory arrived personally about the same time.

The $100 million spend was something about which I was inherently uncomfortable for it seemed about mistaking the poison for the cure.

Domestic violence arises for a host of reasons, but prime among them is our market-driven consumerist based society that creates mostly unfilled aspirations manifesting frustration and anger that frequently erupt as domestic violence.

The PM’s market driven-like response to domestic violence was unveiled on the same day as the co-founder of the world’s Healthy-Cities movement, Professor Trevor Hancock from Canada’s University of Victoria, talked about the “up-river” problem to a room of about 150 people.

He told of a small river-side town that hauled a floating body from the water; day after day the bodies kept floating down the river and so the town developed a complex rescue and morgue infrastructure to remove the bodies and decently dispose of them, until someone suggested maybe the town should lift is gaze and look up-river and see if the source of the problem could be found.

The scenario discussed by Professor Hancock and proposed resolution of domestic violence sound strikingly similar – the PM’s approach to domestic violence focusses on the symptoms and so sees a change in the behaviour of men as resolving the difficulty.

Many of those assumptions are correct, but the actual violence is naught but a symptom for there is a deeper malaise.

There is a broad and sweeping societal malignancy that can be directly related to the profit and growth society that already exists in Australia and one Mr Turnbull wants to further strengthen.

Many directly link domestic violence to the less than honourable male behaviour and of course they are correct, but what causes that corrupt conduct, what frustrates men, why does our way of life disturb personally held understandings of status, erode aspirations, or contort their confidence to such an extent that they seek control by physically lashing out at those nearest them, mostly their female partner?

Existing systems epitomized by the commercial success of our PM promise much, but are analytically foreign to human betterment for they discriminate against equality, while celebrating individuality.

Each of us is of course an individual, but the individualism encouraged and almost enforced throughout modern western societies is foreign to what we really need, which is a sense of belonging, purpose, friendship, collaboration, fellowship and a belief that you are an integral and vital part of your community.

The perpetrator of domestic violence is estranged from his community, and despite appearances, probably frightened, emasculated, lonely and socially impotent and in accessing the only power he has left, he physically or emotionally damages his partner.

Yes, it is up-river; many of our men are thrashing about in a society created pool of frustration, disappointment and powerlessness that causes them to exercise the worst feature of their maleness - violence.

Grand court house proposal assualts good sense

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deas reminiscent of the energy-rich 20^th Century and appealing to and warming egos are embedded in a plan to build a large, glamourous and centralized court in Shepparton.

The grand new court house proposed
 for Shepparton - energy scarcity
and information abundance
makes it already obsolete.

Cutting to the chase, it is simply the wrong thing to do.

Shepparton people frequently lament the centralization of government and health facilities in Melbourne, and a few major regional centres, and now, in a Goulburn Valley sense, we are doing the same thing.

Centralization of services was good sense in the energy rich and information poor 20^th Century, but the circumstances have reversed; we now have an overabundance of information and a scarcity of energy.

Living in what is colloquially known as the “information age” and the officially deemed “Anthropocene” – an era in which humans are now the major influence on the earth’s biosphere – leaves us no option but to design our lives around those two facts.

Rather than taking the people to where the infrastructure is, we should be taking the infrastructure, which now is frequently little more than information, to where the people are.

So instead of spending richly on creating a soon to be impractical 20^th Century piece of infrastructure, we need to understand how the disruptive information technology works and take the until now court house-bound law processes to the people.

The modern court house need be nought more than a mobile, compact team of people, armed with a barrage of technology around which the information age has been built, and through that take what is a virtual court house to the people.

True, the virtual court house idea is not ideal but even a cursory look at world events, with just a hint of understanding, illustrates that Shepparton will not be afforded exemption from the unfolding rigours facing humanity, such as resource scarcity and a seriously disrupted climate, and so maintenance of our civil society might need some less than ideal ideas.

It seems that the concepts upon which the last century were built have infiltrated our being to such an extent that we can no longer think beyond the horizon and our subsequent sclerotic thinking prohibits us from imagining that there might be another way; a better way of doing things that allows us to take off the blinkers that so limit our view and subsequently our perceptions.

What is proposed is unquestionably impressive, but for those of us interested in creating a community that is both sustainable and resilient, and ready to withstand the unsettling and difficult decades ahead, it assaults good sense.

Shepparton should be applauded for its ambitious endeavours in providing the city with a grand new art museum and now an equally grand court house, but considering the needs that our different future will demand, both are inappropriate.

Living life, vicariously

R eporters mostly live life vicariously. They watch, record and write about what went on, but usually as a spectator, looking on from outside the arena. Thinking of this, the words of the late U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt ring loud: Theodore Roosevelt. “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” Quietism, with its philosophical overtones, in some ways describes those who stand outside the arena for they neither challenge nor support anything and in Australia’s prosperous decades of the 50s, 60s and 70s it was a profitable stance. The decade of the eighties changed all that, it continued apace in the 90s and now in the second decade of the 21st Century, it is critical that people, including spectators and reporters, not just watch and report, but join the conversation. Shepparton presently, and urgently, needs all hands on deck, everyone needs to step into the arena, join the affray, take a chance on victory and risk defeat. The city, and it is not alone, needs ideas that will equip it to live with weather quite unlike anything it, and the greater Goulburn Valley have ever experienced. Climate scientists use evidence to illustrate changes in our weather and so they are in the arena using both their skills and knowledge to help us see what is happening and explain why we should join them. Having mostly lived vicariously as a journalist, insisting on objectivity, fairness and balance, my life has largely been that of the spectator, but that all changed about a decade or so ago when it became obvious that because of our behaviour the earth was warming and so the Goldilocks-like climate that has allowed humans to prosper was changing. Climbing the fence and stepping into the arena was the easy part, but struggling with the “dust and sweat and blood” arising from blatant indifference, apathy and the grossly misplaced confidence that technology and man’s inventiveness can resolve all, makes the vicariousness and inculcated quietism of my other life mighty attractive.

Walking and Cycling given priority in five-step city plan

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alking and cycling in line with a “five-step plan” should have priority when imagining Shepparton’s town planning and infrastructure needs.

The need to acknowledge and implement that plan falls upon both the city’s paid officers and its elected representatives.

Let’s look at the plan.

A sign of the times
 in Shepparton.

Step one: The plan and it associated infrastructure must first and foremost be walkable.

Pedestrians must be able to use and access easily wherever it is in the city they want to go.

Step two: Once the needs and convenience of those on foot are attended to, the cyclist should be considered next, meaning that after pedestrians’ needs are resolved, facilities and amenities should be such that cycling is not only easy, but next to walking the preferred method of moving about.

Step three: Obviously, in city as geographically large as Shepparton, walking and cycling are not always feasible or possible and so the next option is public transit and so that should always be close to the top of the planning agenda.

With fossil fuels become less viable, private transport will become an ever reducing option and so the city needs to reinvent Shepparton around one of the many forms of innovative public transit systems.

Shepparton was recently visited by a fellow who explained how the city could be serviced by battery-powered, Google-controlled, driverless vehicles that would circulate throughout the city, taking both people and freight wherever they, and it, needed to go. Such “pods” are already technologically possible.

People and freight would arrive in the city by sophisticated rail and then taken around the city on their Google-controlled, driverless pods.

Step four: This is about land and property use – for a town or city to be walkable, there has to be somewhere to walk to and so our designers need to ensure the city is dotted with beautiful public spaces where people simply want to be.

Property use is also about ensuring the present and preferred idea of sprawl, that is growth at the cities edges, is reversed with the emphasis being put on infill and the development, or redevelopment, is concentrated on the inner-parts of the city where the infrastructure is at its most intricate and developed. The city’s rating system should reflect that, rates being the cheapest in the centre and more costly as you get toward the periphery,

Step five: When steps one through to four are completed, the city’s attention should turn to road transport, but not until all four of the first steps have been totally developed and all options exhausted.

Five fundamental steps toward making Shepparton a city that may just endure the rigours of the 21^st Century; a century that beyond doubt is going to be different from all those passed, particularly the energy-rich 20^th Century.

Considering the terror that is alcohol, the legal drug that tears at society's heart

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eaths of Australians at the hands of terrorists have been comparatively few and rare, but some 15 others from the “lucky country” die every day and hundreds are admitted to hospital in the same 24 hours, all because of alcohol abuse.

The 'legal' drug tearing
at the heart of society.

Governmental and the essential social response has been sorely missing as the  nation has been stampeded into a near state of panic about terrorists, while frighteningly little is being done about our distorted consumption of a legal drug.

So, which is more damaging, or tears more at the fabric of Australian society – the remote possibility that someone might die at the hands of a “terrorist” or the undeniable, unequivocal reality that, as 2010 research shows, excessive and long-term consumption of alcohol kills 5554 people and results in 157 132 hospital admissions in just one year?

Alcohol is legal and is easily accessed and the damage it causes both to those who use it and all those around them, easily surpasses that of those drugs declared illicit and catastrophized by the media.

Heroin, crack cocaine, methamphetamines, marijuana or even tobacco do not come close to the health and safety hazards caused by alcohol.

A recent discussion between friends about the use of methamphetamine (“ice”) produced an argument for the doubling of police numbers, as a minimum, to limit the spread of what was seen as a drug able to rip at the essence of Australian society. No one mentioned the real terror – alcohol.

Coincidently the American-based website, “Wisdom Pills” listed just five reasons why alcohol, the most dangerous of all drugs is not illegal - all five reasons were about the economy.

Alcohol is deeply implicated in most every strata of society and those who have the power to limit its use and restrict its easy availability are mostly just like everyone else, they are “users” and so are stripped of motivation to make the necessary changes.

So while our Prime Minister talks endlessly about “death cults”, engages Australia’s armed forces in pointless confrontations and spends without restraint to attend to the supposed safety of Australians, he sits idly by as thousands die every year from a drug which is both legal and commonly available throughout our communities.

Being a non-drinker, the title of wowser probably fits but such a crown is uncomfortable as the driver is an interest in the facts, devoid of emotion for any person, government or other institution genuinely concerned about societal safety would strip away the sentiment and sensation and consider objectively what it is that is killing so many Australians and what can be done about it.

True, many Australians drink responsibly, but those who oversee the sale of this drug need to act equally responsibly in limiting both its sale and promotion, starting by emulating the cigarette example.

Blood in the streets leads to only more violence, trouble and personal sorrow

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lood in the streets was, I once thought, the only possible resolution for our troubled and dysfunctional world.

Blood in the streets - it doesn't work,
 leading simply to more violence.

That in itself was rather strange for violence was something I found abhorrent, yet “blood in the streets” seemed to a youthful mind as the path to a better world.

Fortunately, age and philosophical maturity saw that sense quickly evaporate, bringing an understanding that the difficulties of the world cannot be resolved through violence of any sort, rather only worsened.

That “blood in the streets” ache was a combination of youthful vigour, aspirations and hope tangled up with a sense of uselessness, desperation, isolation and impotence.

Fortunately other influences in my life were absent, I didn’t drink nor smoke and although heavily maternally influenced as a young boy, I had risen above religion and my sense of self was secure.

Fortunately, also, the times of more than four decades ago were different; dramatically different and the contemporary rash of discontent sweeping around the world was a distant and unimagined reality, as was the internet.

The idea then that people could be radicalized and so embark on a bloody crusade against ordinary people to make a point about ways of life, and philosophies they disliked seemed inconceivable.

Questions about why young men, and young women as illustrated recently by the fleeing of three British girls into the embrace of ISIL, appear to have obvious answers; answers many leaders throughout the world, particularly in the developed nations would not like to hear.

There is, of course a large slither of what most perceive to be religion involved, but in a more human way it is about people responding, as mistaken and distorted as it may be, to the damage that you and me, and all our fellows, are doing to our only home.

People, regardless of where they are from, all have a profound sense of place, their home, and when they see that threatened they will react, frequently violently.

Beyond that, our modern corporatized and globalized world promises much, but delivers little, particularly to most people, exampled by the fact that just one large bus-load of people have control of more wealth and resources than nearly half the world’s people.

Such inequality breeds discontent; discontent distorting the minds of people such that it manifests itself as blood in the streets.

Violence presently witnessed around the world is becoming ingrained and will not be easily resolved, but the first step is about more equitable sharing of the world’s wealth and resources.

Beyond that the governments of the world need to reinvigorate democracy and regain control that by sleight of hand has been surrendered to the world’s corporations.

The option is more blood in the streets.

Yes, we can stop now and we must

“W

e can’t stop now” was a recent utterance about Shepparton’s then proposed new art museum and interestingly an idiom that echoes around the world about how we live and consume.



An artist's impression of what
is proposed at Victoria Park
Lake in Shepparton.

The briefest of searches will illustrate, without any serious contradiction, that we are on the wrong path and it is imperative that we “stop now”.

A new art museum for Shepparton is a wonderful idea, but in locking the city monetarily into particular pathway, it also locks us out from tackling ideas and projects; ideas and projects essential for a city braced to confront the challenges of the 21st Century.

Rather than single major projects such as the art museum that appeal to our better-selves, we should be looking at and investing in what might be termed the “fine grain” of our community.

True, the proposed art museum, as it is envisaged, will have multiply applications, but in a broad sense it will have relatively narrow uses and the overall cost to the community will preclude the creation and development of alternative community assets the future will demand.

It is undeniable that the world has already passed what is colloquially known as “peak oil" and so the collapse of this energy resource marks the end of private transport and so the need for all levels of government to invest immediately and heavily in public transit systems.

Beyond that, those same authorities, and in this case the City of Greater Shepparton, need to legislate and act to create communities that can be easily and conveniently traversed by human powered transport, on foot or by bicycle.

Even though a walk through any of Shepparton’s supermarkets suggest otherwise, finding food will become increasingly challenging and so our council should be planning and creating community gardens throughout Shepparton, Mooroopna and all other centres within the municipality.

The push to improve Melbourne/Shepparton rail services warrants applause, but the real urgency is to refresh, rebuild and recreate the wonderful rail network of earlier this century that laced Victoria together, including the Goulburn Valley.

If Shepparton is to prosper in the coming decades it needs to find another way and not depend on exhausted energy-rich ideas of the 20th Century for a conflation of 21st Century difficulties, among them climate change, makes what once worked, redundant.

That “other way” is not about building stand-alone art museums, rather building a resilience that takes its cues from a simpler life that demands less of earth’s finite resources, encourages us to share those same resources, and reduce our demands on the carbon-rich energy that further disrupts earth’s climate system.

“We can’t stop now” philosophy is clearly wrong, we can stop, and we must stop as the security of future generations rests with us understanding the need to change direction.

Australia's obsession with terrorism can be traced to our sense of mortality

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ustralia’s obsession with terrorism, or at least that of the Federal Government, can be traced to the incumbents’ sense of mortality.

Ernest Becker - he explains
how our fear of death makes
us do what we do.

Look no further than the works of Ernest Becker who explained the perverse motivations stemming from our mortality in his 1973 book, “The Denial of Death”.

The Jewish-American cultural anthropologist and writer, who won the general non-fiction 1974 Pulitzer Prize two months after his death, synthesized the thoughts of thinkers Søren Kierkegaard, Sigmund Freud, and Otto Rank to help us better understand why our denial of death drives what we do.

The basic premise of Becker’s book is that human civilization is ultimately an elaborate, symbolic defense mechanism against the knowledge of our mortality, acting in turn, as the emotional and intellectual response to our basic survival mechanism.

And so each lives in the shadow of certain mortality and our Coalition Government, led by Tony Abbott exploits, knowingly or otherwise, that fundamental flaw in our character to spend huge amounts building elaborate armed forces, introducing perverse limits to personal freedom in the name of safety and within that creates a society-wide fear of the other.

Any brush with mortality, be it physical or through film, literature or discussion, noticeably changes our views on many things, including our willingness to flee into the arms of a strong leader who appears to offer a protective shield against death.

That same leader has sophisticated weaponry, patriotic rhetoric and is supposedly doing God’s will to rid the world of evil, and each of us, subconsciously or otherwise, wrestling with our mortality feel some warmth in aligning ourselves with those seemingly charismatic people.

True, there is no argument, we are all going to die, we are all mortal and it is also true that for the broad betterment of us as individuals and the nation, we need to accept our death rather than deny it.



Alec McLean - his first encounter
 with death was at just four.

Death, many thinkers have explained, often futilely, is intrinsic to living and its acceptance and embrace often make living a vastly more rewarding affair.

My father had his first lesson in death at just four-years-old when his dad died after a horse kicked him in the chest.

His mother died a sad death when she drowned in the River Murray, and in his old age, dad said he spent all his spare time going to friend’s funerals.

A few years before he died, we sat on the river bank drinking tea, talking about death and dying and he said it was something for which he held no fear.  

Subsequently, that chat, along with personal efforts to shoulder open death’s door and being enlightened by Becker, death is personally stripped of its fear and makes me sharply aware that Abbott and his cohort are up to no good.

Work is about wellbeing, a job is about profit

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ork is integral to a person’s wellbeing. A job is not.

Work is something you choose to do; a job something to which you are directed to by another and so the matter of choice is no longer yours.

Therein is a small, but critical and significant difference.

Freedom is about choice and so as your freedom to choose goes, so does you actual freedom.

“Jobs, jobs, jobs,” has been the mantra of most, if not all, in their bid to secure public validation for personal political ambitions.

Everyone from the Prime Minister down chants what is a social more with the success of a society, or the government, being measured by the number of jobs created within that same society.

The drive and need to create jobs is further evidence of our social obedience to a way of life that has drawn its sustenance from the brutal mechanics of the Industrial Revolution and for centuries now has seen profit prioritised ahead of the welfare of people.

Our allegiance to the idea of jobs is evidence of what was at first a flirtation and then an affair to become a habitual way of life that meshes cleanly with the fundamentally contradictory consumerist idea that we can grow infinitely on a finite planet.

Jobs are intimately and intricately entangled with the growth economy, whereas work brings with it more ancient connotations; connotations that are about the provision of essentials; helping us find what we need, rather than want; jobs have a sense of mass production about them; work has an artisan affiliation, allowing for personal expression and a sense of satisfaction and fulfilment that is rarely experienced in our money driven society.

Jobs and our insistence on their creation, from the upper echelons of society, is about maintenance of the modern status quo, whereas work is about the ancient human need to contribute to your community and within that repair and rebuild your sense of self.



Confucius - "Choose a job you
love and you never work
another day in your life".

The difference between having work to do and a job is subtle, but such that it is a damning significance; a contrast that can distort human values to drive people to pursue ideas that would not have normally have attracted them.

Yes, jobs are the salvation of the modern profit-driven world and yes, jobs erode peoples’ expansive thinking and embrace of the other, while work does not until circumstances turn it into a job.

It was Confucius who said: “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”

And through a different prism: “Love the work you do and you will never have worry about finding a job.”

Our communities would be emotionally sounder and richer places if the emphasis was on work rather than finding jobs.

Fearfully trying times from which we have learned little

W

orld War One was a fearfully trying time.

Interestingly, the pacifists among us are finding the four year-long recognition of that disturbing and pointless societal conflict equally trying, but for different and yet similarly damning reasons.

World War One was meant to be the war
that ended all wars - that was most
certainly the case for millions of people,
but not the world, rather it was just
the beginning of damnable fearful times.

Not for a second is the commitment and bravery of those involved in that war questioned, but it seems fatefully futile that thousands of young Australians travelled to places they had never heard of and died in droves.

Long has our desire to fight and the causes of war troubled me and almost without exception the initial disputation that escalated to become war, bringing death a destruction of unimagined extremes, can be traced to the intellectual and emotional immaturity of just a few people.

Subsequently, most any philosophical thoughts about war and its causes interest me and these notes by U.S. scientist and author, Peter Turchin, caught my eye. He said: “This is not to argue that wars are good. I hope that the humanity will eventually evolve to the point where we can abolish wars and all the misery they cause. But when we do it, we will still need an engine of creative destruction to prevent runaway accumulation of power and wealth by the few, and to weed out dysfunctional societies that lost their ability to cooperate.”

Much can be read into Turchin’s observations, but it is the final observation - dysfunctional societies that lost their ability to cooperate – which was bad enough 100 years ago, but is now even worse as democracies are now becoming oligarchies in which inequality prevails and societal dysfunction is afoot.

Some see Shiva as the God of destruction whose task is to clear away the old to make room for the new.

One commentator says, “The present culture of war does neither. Rather is maintains a paradigm of continual struggle for control amongst the power elite that leaves in its wake nothing but death and destruction.

“The so-called value of war as an expression of creative destruction is to ignore the pain of the mother who, standing among the rubble of her former home, holding the lifeless body of her youngest child in her arms, the disillusionment of the soldier who returns to an empty future, crippled in mind or body.”

‘War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing!” he writes, quoting the song.

So considering that, it is time we stopped remembering, recognizing and celebrating what was, and spending untold millions of dollars building myths from events we should never have been a part of and turned our gaze toward today, tomorrow and to our children’s, their children’s future without war..

It has been our addiction to growth, answered through our exploitation of fossil fuels that has enriched the world’s elites, worsened inequality and entrenched societal dysfunction making war a constant recurrence.