Security on our streets begins when we flick a switch

Finding security on Shepparton’s streets seems pretty straightforward – it begins with the flicking of a switch.

It is unlikely your
 television has a
  switch anything like
 this one, but if it had,
 then moving it to the
 off position initiates
 security on our streets.

However, that is reductionism taken to its extreme as the sought after security arises from a social paradigm of such complexity that it makes brain surgery look artless.
Safety on Shepparton’s streets, as is the case for any town or city, begins when we reach for the remote, turn off our televisions and effectively remove from our lives the programmed violence and its daily assault on human values.
We are born as empty vessels and as our lives take shape we are filled by the influences of those around us, the way of life of those who raise us and the philosophies and values of the institutions that impact on our lives, from our schools, the government, laws, the media and finally, and critically, our entertainment.
Television is unchallenged as the one form of media that has almost unimpeded access to our lives, influencing our values from the seemingly impossible cheery morning shows and attention grabbing frivolities throughout the day, to the early evening news and current affairs shows that pander to the corporatism of the world, and the endless blood, gore and drama of evening viewing that ignites and excites our emotions.
Television simply fills up all the emotional holes in life to make the road smooth, but in a strange contradiction it is also hardening our values making us less conscious of community and consequently less willing to step away from our addiction to support our fellows.
And so while the road is smooth it leads to nowhere, at least not to a place where our streets are secure.
Television seeps almost unknowingly into our consciousness, while newspapers, books and magazines demand a more active participation and leads readers into a line by line contemplation and judgement that encourages reflection.

Neil Postman

Being aware of our ever-reducing attention span, television doesn’t allow for such luxuries, hurrying from scenes of war, death and destruction to heart-warming images of a team of rescuers hauling a helpless horse from a bog.
This seamless shift from tragedy and scenes of human deviousness to images of human goodness confuses the intellect and as discussed by Neil Postman in “Amusing Ourselves to Death”, we become desensitized to death and other human difficulties.
That, aligned with a violent computer games and movies in which violence is celebrated, tells the viewers/participants that whatever troubles them can be resolved by bellicose behaviour and so as night follows day, aggression, in its many forms, stalks our streets.
Modern life has conspired with the liberty afforded by our streets to rob them of the what it is those public places allow, a social life that has the wonderful addendum of security.   

Ideas are not only life's oxygen, but also its currency

Ideas may well be the oxygen of life, but they are also its currency.
Communities rich in ideas are vibrant and exciting places to live and as ideas grow so does the wellbeing of those who call it home.

Art by Veronica Kelly
 at Nathalia's 
G.R.A.I.N. Store.

An idea that had been in gestation for a life-time drew its first breath in Nathalia.
Australian/American artist, humanist and human-rights advocate, Bill Kelly, who received his artistic training at the Philadelphia University of the Arts and the National Gallery School in Melbourne, finally settled with his family in the small community.
The Fulbright Fellow and former Dean of the Victorian College of the Arts, had, buried in his mental luggage, an idea to enrich the community and within that expand and extend the reach of art – the not-for-profit G.R.A.I.N. Store   opened late last year.
Kelly’s idea is about strengthening community (it does), but beyond that, life has generally stalled as there is a paucity of implemented ideas that take people beyond what the rather strictures allowed by the commercial/military/industrial complex.
What exists is essentially focussed on growth that takes little note of the cost, be it in the plundering of the earth’s finite resources or equally in the physical or psychological damage to people.
Most of us claim to have open minds and consequently see ourselves as flexible and able to accommodate changes to our way of life, but immediately that new idea, although possibly ancient, unsettles what may be even unconscious conceptions of right and wrong, a sense of fairness and an understanding of what is seen as the good life, then we begin to harden and our resilience vanishes.
The evolved lifestyle we live today, given a cursory glance, is neither right nor wrong, but it will not stand close examination as it survives only because we are spending the capital earth has accumulated over billions of years.
The Goldilocks years – not too hot, not too cold – have allowed us to benefit from earth’s largesse, but that era’s idea, the idea built around growth and the suppression of the other, is exhausted and we urgently need new ideas.
Fresh and workable concepts, such as transition towns and steady-state economies exist, but their introduction and application require us to embrace new ideas, something that historically is not common.
However, from the perspective of a troubled world threatened by uninhibited growth that has little regard for ecological concerns or the finitude of the earth’s resources, we need to step back from the madness of the Western democracies growth ideologies.
The idea that has sustained us for the past two centuries is dead, or has been shown to be counterfeit, and so the new idea, or the new currency, needs to be about people, rather than things.

Proposed levy will ultimately be ineffective

Australia’s new flood levy will ultimately be ineffective.

Individually the cost is insignificant, but with most Australian workers tipping into the fund, it will have sufficient financial clout to see much of what has been damaged, repaired.
Returning to a business as usual paradigm is understandable, but it is a lost opportunity.
Australians should work together to ensure their fellows are safe and not alienated from comforts that bring contentment and allows a worthwhile contribution, but rather than rebuild processes and infrastructure that worsened the difficulty, we should be exploring and investing in a strikingly different way of living.
Most of us, including me, have been seduced by the bounty we enjoy in this modern life, a way of life funded by the consumption of what those who follow should inherit.
So rather than spending with enthusiasm to re-build a life dependent on practices known to worsen climate change, that money should be directed at understanding a different way of living.
Australia already has many voluntarily set up Transition Towns organizations, groups that are working to prepare their communities to live and flourish in a low-energy future, and they, and their communities, would benefit greatly from Federal Government recognition and funding.
Resilience is an idea often discussed at such groups and it is essential those presently dealing with the aftermath of floods understand that concept.
Transition groups, we have one in Tatura (about 18km east of Shepparton in Northern Victoria), explore how we can live a fulfilling and contented life in a future that is missing many of things now considered normal.
Rather than simply return to a life as it was, Queensland and Victorian people affected by the floods, along with the broader population, need to re-imagine life and apply cash from the levy to re-engineer of life.
The starting point in any community re-building process is equality, something many would argue is impossible to achieve, but that error in thinking doesn’t devalue its pursuit as research illustrates equality positively impacts on the poorest to the wealthiest.
This levy is an opportunity to help communities become resistant to similar future difficulties and resilient enough to survive them should they happen again, something climate change makes almost certain.