Newspaper readers can help make an idea a reality

Newspaper readers have much to do
 beyond just read - they have a critical
role in  the achievement or world peace.

Readers of this newspaper (first published in the Shepparton News) have a significant and important individual role to play in achieving world peace.

Should that sound outlandish, just remember world peace is simply an idea and nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.

Interestingly it is an idea that appears to have wide currency for frequently people declare that world peace is what they most desire.

Maybe such an answer sounds politically correct and simply gives the respondent a warm and fuzzy feeling as it makes them feel as if they are at one with the universe, even if for a moment.

That said, there is a difficulty for the intent, or wish seems to get lost, or at least politically distorted, when it is contaminated by the rush, wants and needs of the real world, and so the statement is simply rhetorical and never makes it into the realms of practicality

Such a suggestion does the idea of peace a serious disservice for the absence of confrontation, violence or pugilistic-like behaviour is what is real; what’s not real and absent all remnants of civility is the so-called “real world”.

In that “real world” we argue, and frequently resort to killing each other, over almost anything.

The 20^th century was passionately violent and the “great peace”, as described by some, from after WW2 through to the beginning of the 21^st century fell that way as humanity lolled about gorging itself after discovering the keys to nature’s pantry – fossil fuels multiplied fabulously the efforts of every individual.

Distracted by that energy abundance we partied and built like there was no tomorrow, seemingly oblivious that there is actually a tomorrow; a tomorrow populated by people we haven’t meet yet and to whom we have an ethical and moral responsibility.

And so we return to peace.

Ask most people and they are eager to leave the world in good shape for those that follow, or that is what they say.

We need to husband what energy we have for while it does many things, it leverages peace, but peace, real peace begins with you; your thoughts, your speech and your behaviour, and, of course, how you treat your fellows.

Peace in its finality is a complex beast, but it begins and is built on a simplicity that is foreign to the complexities of our modern world.

Most believe they contribute naught to the violence that pervades our world, but we need to be careful; careful in many ways, but particularly in whom we hand responsibility for we don’t need leaders and other decision makers who militarize the language.

The solution is not in subduing the other and winning, rather it is collaborating and co-operating to stand side-by-side rather than face-to-face.

Climate should be discussed and notice taken of W.B. Yeats

Climate change must be the first order of business at Brisbane’s November G20 forum.

W.B Yeats - "“Things fall apart;
the centre cannot hold”.

Those at the forum should not or cannot avoid the topic.

An understanding of the science explaining how our world is changing would allow those at the forum to make informed and reasoned judgements about international economic cooperation.

Any decisions made without first recognising and allowing for the differences climate change will bring to our market-driven society are irresponsible.

Economic growth, as understood by most, is entirely dependent upon a benign climate and the uninhibited access to the earth’s finite resources; resources that have taken billions of years to accumulate.

Those ageless resources are now so depleted and subsequently becoming so scarce and expensive that to enhance a process depending on unlimited “everything” is  reckless and in the eyes of some, a crime against humanity.

Strong words: words that elicit thoughts of the post WW1 Yeats poem, “The Second Coming” in which he writes: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”.

The equations that will drive our ultimate demise are not complicated and to understand them requires little more than primary school mathematics and nothing of the arcane, convoluted and bizarre intellectual trickery the will prevail at Brisbane in November.

Our Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, one who stands among those who deny global warming, has already declared that climate change will not be allowed to interfere with the “important” talks at the Brisbane forum.

Contrary to that, Mr Abbott should be encouraging his international counterparts to consider the undeniable realities of climate change, while adhering to its stated aim: “We will identify the remaining key obstacles to be addressed and reforms needed to achieve stronger, more sustainable and balanced growth in our economies”.

These obviously highly-intelligent people appear to be locked into fantasy-fuelled belief that technology will rescue humanity from this collision of economic chaos, resource depletion, over-population, governance disorder and seemingly endless military confrontation. It won’t, we need social solutions.

G20 leaders say their immediate task is to break the cycle of low growth and diminished business and consumer confidence, something it says it is well placed to achieve in Brisbane.

Should they be serious about global economic security then they must first consider climate change; restructure the global economy to ensure financial equality for all, end the hugely disparate earnings around the world; understand what “sustainable” really means; ensure gender equality; invest heavily in building resilient communities; and educate and help people understand how they can grow and provide much of their own food.

Organic growth, and resilience, will sprout from communities of a type sadly unlikely to be considered at Brisbane in November.

Quoting Yeats again: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”.

 

We are losing perspective and wasting social and political capital

Some 38 Australians died in the skies over Ukraine and so Australia unhesitatingly wades into the resulting international intrigue, spending vast sums and expending, both frivolously and wastefully, social and political capital.

The tragedy over the skies of Ukraine pales
 when compared to the self-induced
 tragedy right here in Australia.

In contrast, recent research clearly shows some 15 Australians will die every day from drinking alcohol and that attracts only questions about the accuracy of the research; a few jokes; some chest beating and then, nothing of any consequence.

Alcohol will kill some 5500 people this year and nearly 160 000 will be hospitalised because of alcohol related difficulties.

Along with those startling realities is the unseen and somewhat unmeasured tragedy of alcohol in which families are torn apart; private and public property damaged and destroyed; careers disrupted and ruined; and all that is good about being human debased.

As sad as the Ukraine airliner tragedy might be, it is irrelevant in the extreme compared to the non-stop tragedy right here at home that this year will kill, we know, more than 5000 people.

Rather than stomping around the world spending our money and untold goodwill attempting to untangle the web of eastern European complexities, our politicians should be using our money and their time and effort to help their fellow Australians understand that the answers they search for are not at the bottom of a glass.

Echoes of the ANZACS reverberate around the Flight MA17 phenomenon.

Both events have had a huge, and understandable, emotive pull on Australians and have been exploited by our politicians of all stripes,

Many Australians, and New Zealanders, died nearly a century ago at what is now known as “Anzac Cove”, and now a comparatively few Australians died when Flight MA17 was shot down over Ukraine.

Those who fought and died to become “ANZACS” in the uncertainties of the First World War have been mythologized and successive governments have spent lavishly to burnish the ghastliness of death in the name of your country.

A purposely painted picture of humble clerks or council workers, or countless other ordinary men and women, simply scrambling to stay alive in fearfully desperate circumstances as “heroic warriors”, has been a major political bonus for nearly a century.

The polish used to mythologise those who fought and died in wars is now being applied to the victims of flight MA17 and so our nation’s emotions have been roused to the point where almost any solution, at any cost, is permissible.

We are losing perspective – MA17 is important, but rather than focus on one event in a relatively remote part of the world over which we had no control, our nation’s energies should be concentrated on easing a domestic problem over which we do have ultimate control and could save the lives of more than 5000 Australians.

But we won’t do anything. Why? It’s simply too hard; it’s politically divisive; alcohol and its consumption is a populist issue with our addiction crossing all boundaries, political or otherwise.

Answering MA17 questions will lionize our politicians; slowing the deaths from alcohol, along with the urgent and essential changes, will make them villains.

Talking with strangers, falling foul of an adage

Prof Penny Russell.

An adage is frequently used in a metaphorical sense to help explain a complex message in just a few words.

The phrase such as “A fish always rots from the head down” is an adage suggesting that when an organization or state fails, it is the leadership that is the root cause.

The adage that the “spoken word can never be revoked” is understood to have a biblical history and that being the case it would undoubtedly not be used in its original format in today’s secular conversation.

However, only recently it surfaced during a short conversation with Sydney’s Professor Penny Russell on one of Brisbane’s wonderful “CityCat” ferries.

Prof Russell was travelling to the St Lucia campus of the University of Queensland to attend a meeting of the Australian Historical Association.

As an historian, Prof Russell has long been eager to better understand manners and broader behaviour and so in 2010 wrote about much of what she had learned in the book “Savage or Civilized?”

In the introduction to the book, Prof Russell said that when she told people she was writing about Australian manners, they tended to laugh and ask, “Have you found any yet?”

Quizzed about the book, it quickly became obvious that what the Professor had written was not proscriptive, that is deciding what is right and wrong and so suggesting answers, rather it was descriptive, simply explaining what existed and why.

Prof Russell said she always found that one generation frequently considered its manners to be better than those of following generations.

That, she explained is rather subjective and needs to be considered in the context of the times – for example Facebook demands manners that would be foreign to and simply unknown by people of even a generation earlier.

Discussing manners, Prof Russell said it was once considered an abuse of manners for a man to talk with a woman while wearing hat – bingo!

Yours truly was wearing a flat cap; an apology was volunteered and accepted by Prof Russell who said that it was just an example of what had once been common and as she could hear her own words as she looked at my cap.

It was a poignant lesson about manners and a wonderful example of how the spoken word can never be revoked.

Elected to the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2012, Prof Russell is the Bicentennial Professor of Australian History, Chair at the Department of History at the University of Sydney.

Having only just begun to read her book, it seems a personal practice of talking with a stranger every day would have generations ago put me into the “savage” class as it was then considered bad manners to talk with anyone without first being introduced.

(Having read this, Prof Russell added an adage of her own: '”Beware of what you say to strangers, lest they turn out to be journalists”?)

The incoherency of democracy stumbling from a 'low blow'

Writing coherently about something that is decidedly incoherent is difficult.

Democracy stumbled recently as it took a low blow with the repeal of the carbon pricing mechanism and so appears ill-equipped to untangle the complexities of climate change.

Former Australian PM, Kevin Rudd, among others, including many from the other side of the ideological divide, have declared climate change as humanity’s greatest ever moral challenge.

That observation follows an even earlier comment from former U.S. President, Jimmy Carter who said in 1971 that the energy crisis was “the moral equivalent to war”. Climate change is about many things, but chief among them is our frivolous use of energy.

Few, if any have argued for the abandonment of democracy, a social governance process that has underpinned societies for more than two centuries , but it was no less than Albert Einstein who said a problem cannot be resolved by the thinking from which is arose.

The world now faces difficulties created and encouraged by democracy and so applying the Einstein maxim that revered social governance process should now be questioned.

Democracy allows for debate, difference of opinion, the rule of law and within and around those attributes, tolerance.

That heady mix of values are now entrenched, most certainly in developed countries and although they now have a foothold in many other places, their import is as varied as the cultures which have embraced them.

Returning again to Mr Rudd’s 2007 observations, he noted then that climate change was so vast that it was beyond politics.

His prescient comments apply to what presently exists – climate change is unquestionably the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced and democracy appears unequal to those challenges.

Beyond that, the magnitude of what is ahead appears to escape the understanding of the Abbott-led government.

Yes, addressing the causes and mitigation of climate change is something that is beyond politics and demands creative, innovative and courageous ideas that appear to exceed the capacities of existing egalitarianism.

Democracy as an ideal is to be celebrated, but it was adherence to its fundamentals that gave rise to the Anthropocene – a scientifically recognized era acknowledging the influence of man; an era of industry, growth, conflict and profit that has disrupted the world’s climate.

Sadly, the climate change conversation has been politicized creating a “them and us”, a “goodies and baddies”-type discussion, which is simply wrong for no-one is correct or incorrect, no-one is either good or bad rather, we’re all responsible and so together face the unintended consequences of the natural expression of our species’ will to survive.

So where do we go from here?

Work hard to understand and reclaim democracy; support those who epitomise its values and step away from those who don’t.

Standing writes about 'the precariat' and provides a template for the Australian Budget

Guy Standing wrote about the
 'precariat' in 2011 and provided,
 unintentionally, a template for
Australia's 2014 budget.

Guy Standing unintentionally provided a template for the first budget of the Tony Abbot-led Coalition Government.

The British professor of Development Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London wrote about “The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class”.

Most everything the professor discussed in his 2011 book as damaging to society has been embraced through the intricacies of this year’s federal budget.

The “precariat” arises when people find themselves in precarious life positions; that it become increasingly difficult to find work and frequently they can only find lower-skilled, temporary positions that are inevitably poorly paid.
Our market-driven consumer society demands a regular and substantial income, something that is missing when people find themselves in casual, temporary and poorly paid work.

Those living in and operating on the fringes of society – that so-called “fringe” is now creeping into the fabled middle-class” - have long been the prime users of a societal welfare infrastructure that is now being eroded by a government that has declared an end to the “age of entitlement”.

Utilitarianism, much discussed and criticised by Standing, has been wildly embraced by the present government that believes all are equal and in applying its ideological strait-jacket expects all people, whatever their skills, talents or intellectual adaptation to the market system, to survive unaided.

Nice thought, but it is clearly wrong for not all have the necessary aptitudes to prosper in a society whose emphasis is on profit and has little regard for the welfare of people.

A market-driven society in which everything is a commodity, including people, and has no respect for idleness and leisure, both attributes upon which innovation is reliant, as they make no obvious contribution to the balance sheet.

This rude push to put an economic value on everything robs people of reflection, leaving them with no time to contemplate, ponder and simple wonder about a better way.

The agenda of our relatively new Coalition Government has seeped into every crevice of Australian society and nothing appears sacrosanct in its bid to make repairs to the country’s budget; repairs that disinterested economists argue are not needed and are little more than a fabrication.

Everything, even our intergenerational responsibilities, are being discounted as our government rails against everyone who finds comfort in renaissance-like values of literature, philosophy, art, music, politics, science, religion, and other aspects of intellectual inquiry.

The ideological neoliberal-driven agenda has the government muddling about in the past and pandering to populism; a populism fuelled by a fallacious fear of the other, a distorted sense of security and a misunderstanding of risk.

Standing explains how those any many other matters are giving rise to the “precariat”. His book is unsettling, but worth reading.

Basque Country once ripped asunder, is now rebuilt and helping show the way.

Spain’s Basque Country was a personally unknown entity until discussed by Nathalia artist and social justice/peace activist, Bill Kelly.

Nathalia artist and social
justice/peace activist, Bill Kelly
 with a piece he drew
following a recent operation.
 

“Kelly”, as he is known by everyone, including his wife, Veronica, has a unique interest in the Basque County evolving from his passion for both art and peace.

A decades-long interest in the Pablo Picasso painting “Geurnica” created in response to the bombing of the Basque Country village in northern Spain, by German and Italian warplanes the Spanish Civil War on the eve of World War Two, has left Kelly with a unique perspective of Geurnica.

An American by birth who has lived in Australia for decades, Kelly has a third allegiance which is almost as powerful as both his birth and now home-place.

Much of Kelly’s art has a sense of yearning for peace – the essence to Picasso’s “Geurnica” and he visits there at least annually to contribute to ceremonies recognizing when peace died at the Basque village in 1937 and is now reborn.

With personal interest in everything of the Basque Country ignited by Kelly, it was fascinating to learn that a professor of political and social philosophy at the University of the Basque Country, Daniel Innerarity, is a prolific author of books discussing the human condition.

“Humanity at Risk: The Need for Global Governance”, a series of essays edited by Innerarity with Javier Solana, includes a quote from the a founder and editor of the daily Il Manifesto, the late Luigi Pintor, who said, “A society that assumes growth as its goal is like a person who considers obesity an ideal.”

Following the Pintor quote was an essay by Dimitri D’Andrea from the University of Florence in which he discusses the globalized risk and global threat for future generations from climate change.

The famous "Guernica" by Pablo Picasso.

D’Andrea wrote: “The fact that global warming is rooted in the ‘economic innocence of day-to-day consumption’ makes the catastrophe threatening us doubly unthinkable; unthinkable for it is too big for us to imagine and unthinkable because it is difficult to trace back to normal everyday life”.

The involvement of Basque Country thinkers in this social dilemma is not surprising for although they are relatively simple people who have lead equally simple lives for centuries, they are recognised deep thinkers who have contributed much to the world community.

The unannounced and unprompted attack on Geurnica in 1937 ruptured modern life in the Basque Country and in a seemingly disconnected way prepared the Basque people for the certain rigours that a changing climate will bring.

Kelly has been privileged to watch the Geurnican people recover from that sudden and violent rupture of their peaceful lives and within that play an important part in the rebuilding of the community; a community, for their work towards reconciliation and environment, named as a “UNESCO European City of Peace”. They are now far better able to, and are preparing for a different future.