Unrealized compassion is the silver lining in a very dark cloud

An often unrealized understanding of the broad compassion communities have for its people quickly becomes clear when a road collision kills or injures one of its number.

Inattention coupled with a
 multitude of other ingredients can
 lead to collisions.

In what seems like only moments, news of the collision and it consequences ricochet around the respective community and this hitherto unseen, and often unrealized, compassion, sympathy and eagerness to help erupts.
Should we search in desperation for the silver lining in this dark cloud that settles upon us after a road collision then it is this – the astonishing community bonding that emanates when a collision brings death or injury, turmoil and tragedy.
People, some often remote from the tragedy itself, respond in what is a very human way bringing in anyway they can to those involved, warmth, support, reassurance and the personal contact that is known to be critical in repairing the physical or emotional damage arising from the collision.
Collision survivors are often strikingly alone for while the event might have left them with certain, and obvious, physical difficulties, it is frequently the unseen emotional changes that trigger a pervasive sense of isolation.
Many survivors often tell about the evaporation of friendships once it becomes obvious they are longer able to participate in the spontaneity often demanded by personal relationships.
However, and importantly, some in our communities willingly take up that responsibility and so provide that essential human contact that the welfare each of us hinges on.
The recuperation and renovation of a person depends upon many things, but few, beyond the intricacies of medicine, have move impact than social contact and that is often to be found in the work place.
Work, regardless of what it is, has a social value that far exceeds whatever financial reward it may or may not attract.
A “Cool Heads” program at Shepparton’s Harder Auditorium on Wednesday night was structured with the aim of encouraging young drivers to avoid the road collisions and subsequent personal dilemmas that bring on the aforementioned community compassion.
Walking home after the event allowed time for messages and graphic images to expand and provide another reminder that safe road use is about attitude and an understanding of the consequences.

Talk about women in uniform is ill-directed

Discussion about the rightness or wrongness of women joining men in the violence of frontline military roles is seriously ill-directed.
It is neither, rather it is a conversation that avoids good sense and in being irresponsible is simply the confirmation of our infatuation with patriarchal views.

Rather than see women doing
 this, we would like to know
 why it seems we must fight.

Really, we should be discussing why we go to war and feel the need to fight at all – either men or women?
It’s easy to holler “yes, fight” and brandish a finger, as if it is a sword, pointing to moments, illustrated by libraries of books, in which we either fought or died.
Mankind has always preferred black and white solutions – simplistic kill or be killed-like answers – for despite claims of our sophisticated thinking, we are, in moments of crisis, less than intellectually adventurous.
And rather than adhere to that naive live or die tactic, we owe it to the human race, or more specifically ourselves, to expand our thinking, allowing ourselves to consider why we fight and what we can do to avoid such dilemmas.
Our societies have evolved to become behaviourally masculine, which, in particularly defined moments, has been invaluable.
Humanity, however, would never have emerged from the mists of its past without female love, care and nourishment being added to the mix, a subtle essential ingredient we are about to spill, and waste, on our battlefields.
The endurance of humanity depends upon many attributes, first among them being equality among all people and, importantly, men and women.
Stripped of all its finery, there is, therefore, no rational argument against women joining men on the battlefield – unbridled equality.
That supposition, however, overlooks two central questions about whether or not women should be allowed to die with their male counterparts on our battlefields.
Equality is about the notion of people generally, not exclusively men and women, having free and open access to the same advantages and, naturally, disadvantages.
Why, it must be asked, is it that humans appear to have a bent for bellicose behaviour that manifests itself in conflicts?
So rather than investing obscene amounts of money, time and effort into how we can subdue the other with violence, we need to refurbish our thinking, renew our philosophies and learn afresh that even though something might look dire, the best outcome will be arrived at through the embrace of collaboration, kindliness and sensitivity.
Equipped with such feelings and carrying only care and compassion in their hearts and reinforced by the principle of human well-being, the traditional idea of a soldier,  either male or female, would wither.  
Women seeking equality on the battlefields that the minds of men have wrought chase a chimera; their efforts, and time, would be better spent first understanding why we go to war at all.

A seminal year in Australian history

This is a seminal year in Australian history.
More Australians will retire from work in 2011 than will set out on their work-life journey.

CEO of the Committee for
 Melbourne, Andrew
McLeod.

And then, some 15 years later, 2025, there will be a whole raft of Australians retiring who have had superannuation all their work life.
Both matters will shape our towns and cities and are just two critical demographics being considered by the Committee for Melbourne.
The committee arose some 25 years ago from what was then a seemingly directionless city and since has been actively working to make the whole geographic organism that is Greater Melbourne a better place in which to live.
The idea that became the City for Melbourne was driven by who were then some of the city’s leading businessmen backed by some of Australia’s pre-eminent companies.
Those same ideas have spread to several regional Victoria centres and recently the committee’s Chief Executive Office, Andrew McLeod, said he and another from his team would happily visit Shepparton to discuss, and initiate the groundwork, for the establishment of a Committee for Shepparton.
Asked why such a committee would be different than an existing chamber of commerce, Mr McLeod, said such organisations have a primary interest in the commercial wellbeing and health of a town or city, while a Committee for Shepparton would have a more sweeping mandate.
Such committees consider all aspects of a city’s liveability, transport, the placement of residential areas and their density, services available in and to the city, access to and availability of leisure and recreation, and the creation of public spaces.
Considering the demographics of Melbourne, Mr McLeod said his committee anticipates Melbourne’s population growing to about eight million by 2060.
Melbourne had about two million in 1960 and according to Mr McLeod those of his parent’s generation had overseen the doubling of that number to recently see it voted as the world’s most liveable city. “Why”, he asked, “can’t we do that again”.
Talking recently with a group of architects, planners, urban designers and others involved in shaping our cities, Mr McLeod said it was critical to get people excited about the future and heighten their optimism.
Supported by business, the committee obviously leans toward projects and ideas that improve the city’s commercial life, but that is softened through membership and involvement by academia and a number of welfare organizations.
Such organizations, Mr McLeod points out, are free from the rigours of democracy in that the effectiveness of those involved is not time restricted and do not depend on fanciful populist impressions of those who elect them.
“Committees for” concern themselves with many things, among them social cohesion, which Mr McLeod says, is a rare and fragile commodity.

Public brutality brings on a personal death

Hold your breath, steel your heart and look away for one of our number dies today (Thursday, September 22).

Troy Davis

The U.S. pardons board on Tuesday rejected a last-ditch plea for clemency from death row inmate, Troy Davis. He will be put to death today at 9am by lethal injection at a prison in Jackson, south of Atlanta.
News’ readers may well be remote in geographical terms, but in a psychological sense, alarming close as if it is happening here in Shepparton, particularly if we allow ourselves to think about the rather brutal death of Davis.
Tired clichés about “state sanctioned murder” and “racial injustice” (Davis is black and the police officer it is alleged he murdered is white) leap to mind, but deeper issues about capital punishment warrant our attention, and thought.
Capital punishment had never troubled me much, one way or the other, until I read George Orwell’s “A hanging” and through that short essay he ignited in me a revulsion that another should, or could, die at my say so.

George Orwell

Orwell wrote about the “unspeakable wrongness” of hanging a man, in this case it’s a lethal injection, but the result, however, is the same.
An image from Orwell’s essay cemented in my thoughts emerges from a description of Orwell, then a police officer in India, walking to the gallows with the condemned fellow only to have the man step around a puddle to avoid getting his feet wet.
That very human thing was strangely important to a man who was just minutes from dying – that rich image lives with me, emphasizing the unnerving disconnect between what is human and death.
Capital punishment was finally abolished in all Australian states in 1984 and Ronald Ryan was hanged in 1967, finding a sad niche in our history to be the last to die at the direction of the state.
Considerable doubt exists about the guilt of Davis and even the former US president Jimmy Carter and Pope Benedict XVI have joined the campaign to spare his life, a life that ends today after more than two decades of legal manoeuvering.
Davis’s death will be witnessed by those required by law and with them will be the dead police officer’s widow and children.
As much as we might like, we can’t hide in the anonymity of the crowd as it is in fact the “crowd” that is putting Davis to death, not some impersonal piece of machinery.
Fortunately, Australians have shown the exceptional good sense to step aside from capital punishment and now, in another move that will further enhance our mental health, we need to consider our behaviour in the Middle East and how it equates with capital punishment.

We need to watch and learn from our front row seat

Goulburn Valley people, and their Australian fellows, have a front row seat to watch the removal of another rivet in the superstructure supporting the U.S.

America's President,
Mr Barack Obama.

U.S. president, Barack Obama, has argued for a package of tax cuts and government spending aimed at invigorating his country’s economy.
The package, worth about $US447 billion ($A421 billion), is ill-directed, being aimed at a return to business as usual and in doing so appeasing most Americans who see their comfort in living as they have for many decades.
Rather than spend the country’s wealth on a way of life that is unquestionably unsustainable, Mr Obama and those around him, should overtly embrace the hope, audacity and the idea of change that saw him elected in 2008.
America is staring at economic collapse; a societal breakdown that will end its world hegemony and is the natural outcome of what former political philosophy professor and noted author, Sheldon Wolin, has described as “inverted totalitarianism”.
Wolin sees decided danger in the dysfunctional marriage between government and the corporate world, a union that he argues has routed democracy leaving America with a militarized, industrial complex.
Survival of that complex hinges on an obedient populace, one, which in Wolin’s terms, is distracted and titillated by such things as sport, entertainment and discussion and debates about what are ultimately unimportant matters.
And so while democracy survives in name, what America has, and Australia trails along behind, is inverted totalitarianism – a facade claiming social equity, but which is really a process favouring a few.
Mr Obama’s plan does have tax cuts for both employee and employers and billions to prevent teacher lay-offs and hire more police and fire officers, and it would spend $50 billion to improve highways, railroads, transit and aviation.
Examined, however, through the prism of climate change and seriously depleted energy resources, the plan’s outline quickly becomes distorted and dated.
Rather than grasp at exhausted ideas, the Americans need to abandon what once worked, and failed, allowing them to embark on an adventurous and exciting new project that would fundamentally change the fabric of its society.
Such systemic change is resisted by an American elite that appears unable to comprehend the fraying of its empire and beyond that is so misled by its own beliefs and values, that its impending doom goes unseen.
Rather than rescuing flailing and failing companies, the U.S. should be advancing concepts that call for the localization of communities and employing the idea of late author and influential economist and statistician, E.F. Schumacher that “small is beautiful”.
America is the world’s biggest and most influential economy and as its collapse will render ours destitute; we need to watch attentively, and learn, from our front row seat.

Living and coping with the challenges of Alzheimer's disease

Australia’s ageing population brings many riches, but they do not come without a cost.

Old age offers much, but
brings many complications.

The knowledge and wisdom of the baby boomers, now mostly in their sixties and beyond, is being lost with Commonwealth Government statistics showing that about 250 000 people in Australia have dementia.
Dementia, the government’s Department of Health and Ageing has said, is not a natural part of ageing and there are many different types of diseases and conditions that cause dementia-like symptoms.
After the age of 65, it adds, the likelihood of being diagnosed with dementia doubles every five years and people over the age of 85 currently have a one in four chance of developing dementia.
The financial cost to Australia is huge and growing, but the unmeasured cost is the physical hurt and emotional pain imposed on carers and others supporting those who actually have dementia.
Dementia is triggered by many diseases, and among them is Alzheimer’s disease, which worsens the functioning of a person’s brain impacting on such things as such as speech and language, personality, decision-making and judgment or awareness and ability to interact with the environment.
Difficulties arising from a brain whose capacities are being eroded have become intimately familiar in the past decade with first my mother-in-law dying from complications associated with Alzheimer’s disease and now my father-in-law, although in his late 80s, is wrestling with the same adversities.
He is a beautiful man (I accept my familial biases), honest, loyal, generous, courteous and in every sense a gentleman.
Those qualities still exist and were evident when his daughter, my wife, and I cared for him for about a week just recently.
It was a lovely, but sad, time – Basil was a wonderful houseguest during which time it was important to focus on the moment and not think too much about him once being the efficient and effective manager of the Echuca livestock saleyards.

My father-in-law
 managed events such as this
 two or three times a week.

He had once, two or three times a week, orchestrated sales involving hundreds of animals, co-ordinating their sale, movement within the yards and, ultimately, their readiness for transport by the buyers.
Alzheimer’s disease has been the formal diagnosis and steps have been taken to slow its onset and although they have been effective to some degree, the side-effects, occasionally, have been unwelcome.
Patriarchs are often portrayed as the rock upon which families depend and the mental deterioration of one shouldering that responsibility brings a seismic shift in family dynamics.
His authority, seemingly suddenly erased by the disease, has shifted what were once his responsibilities to his children bringing convoluted undercurrents that are worsened by the complexities of emotions arising from these chaotic times.
The raw cost to society through the loss of a valuable member is measurable, but not so the unsettling confusion surrounding that loss.

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.