A sunset of contradictions and denials

Life’s sunset brings contradictions that sees most us again ignoring, or denying, reality.


Growing old is
 somewhat different
 than how it is
protrayed by today's
 marketers.

Living on death’s doorstep brings truths that our materialistic marketers prefer to overlook as they set about selling old age as about increasingly good times, laughing and enjoying the company of friends in near ideal circumstances.
Those same marketers avoid any mention of deteriorating health and sell those sunset years as the best of your life, and for some they may be, but for many I have known, they were quite different.
Life was loaded with all the expected highs and lows, but beyond that the journey to old age looked satisfyingly predictable only to be overwhelmed by ill-health and a disorder that left the marketers’ promises in disarray.
An advertisement painting a cheerful and glowing picture of life in a retirement village peopled by an endlessly smiling and obviously healthy cast had just ended when I learned that an older extended family member had died.
He had never been among that “cast” as beyond a short spell in a retirement home, he had lived alone with his dog after the death of his wife from Alzheimer’s disease several years before that.
My father-in-law, a war veteran, in his late-eighties and a truly honourable gentleman, his missed completely the claimed joy of the sunset years as for years he was pre-occupied caring for his wife before she died with Alzheimer’s and now his  health is such that the care he was once so generous with is being equally devoted to him.
He had a brief interlude of happiness when he married again, but deteriorating health is seeing that bliss evaporate, and subsequently his sunset years have been, and are, quite unlike that the marketers promote.
This troubling dichotomy between what our sunset years really are and what’s marketed, promised, and expected, seems to be a product of the baby boomer ”me” generation that was born and raised, and now aged, in the years of plenty, leaving them with unattainable and unsustainable expectations.
Primed by a paradigm that has always promised, and delivered, more, the boomers, being archetypical consumers, look to maintain their hold on life’s largesse and so, without much thought, expect continuation of the comforts they have long enjoyed.
Living on death’s doorstep will be, beyond a few exceptions, challenging because of deteriorating health and the compounding difficulties brought on by age, and worsened in every sense by exhaustion of our finite world and the complexities of a burgeoning population.
Ageing, however, does bring an increase in wisdom, mostly, and, again mostly, an expanded understanding and application of patience, qualities that will be at a premium as we negotiate contradictions between promises and reality.

A secure and non-violent future demands a daring, daunting and perilous mission

Grand and heroic projects are sadly most often allied with violent historical epochs, but life has evolved to present us now with an even more daring, daunting and perilous mission.

Nonviolence will play a
key role in addressing global
 warming.

Faced with global warming; entrenched inequality; crumbling economics; the exhaustion of our fossil fuels, particularly oil; exponential population growth; the degradation of the world’s top soils; vandalism of our forests; the looming crisis of our food supplies; the erosion of our humanity by God-like technology; the collapse of earth’s bio-diversity and endless wars brought about by a surreptitious and misunderstood anger that has infiltrated life at every level, we look, with desperation, for the exit sign.
Many turn to supernatural forces or beings in their search for a solution, but the answer they seek is right here, with us, we hold it in our hands or, at least, in our way of thinking.
The remedy rests with nonviolence and although that might seem easy and achievable, it is not. Living a genuine, and unflinching, nonviolent life is only possible through a courageous and radical reshaping of our lives: a truly grand and heroic project.
That said and accepted, where do we start? Facing sweeping emotionally and seemingly overwhelming difficulties, many do nothing, but to lean, for a moment, on a cliché – the journey to anywhere, in this case nonviolence, begins with the first step.
That first step can be here, in Shepparton, or more intimately, in your mind and that beginning is simply about using language that is nonviolent, both in terms of the words you use and, importantly, their intent.
Although subtle, such a change can alter your understanding and interpretation of events and equally how others feel about what is happening in their lives.
Along with paying attention to what we say, and how we say it, we should consciously avoid anything that normalizes violence, something about which the mainstream media is frequently guilty.
Television is among the worst offenders and so should be simply turned off, and other information sources – newspapers, magazines, books, movies and the various forms of social media – should be treated with caution and accessed selectively.
Much of what we imagine entertainment, and frequently sport, is fanciful cloaked violence and our modern commercial world is about winners and losers in which covert violence boosts bank balances.
Genuine nonviolence is a concept so difficult to both comprehend and employ that is rarely has any true traction prompting the observation from one that nonviolence was tried for a week and abandoned as it didn’t work, ignoring the fact that centuries of violence have completely failed humanity.
Bad things happen quickly, good things take time – violence springs from our ancient, reptilian brain; nonviolence arises from modern, sophisticated and mature brains.

Let's abandon male-madness to align ourselves with the power of ideas, ingenuity, literacy, art and science,

Official visitors to most any country are greeted by a show of force.
Countries, almost without exception, immediately flex their military muscle, or at least a symbol of it, as that guest walks from their plane.

Influential German
 American political
theorist, Hannah Arendt.

This flashy show of military muscle frequently does not end there either for as the visitor undertakes their tour of all, or part, of the country the idea that we are psychologically wedded to the violence is repeated.
Soldiers bearing arms, jets flying over and occasionally military vehicles rolling-by seem to punctuate the official’s visit.
This constant reference to the military, and by implication our willingness to kill others, is a centuries old affectation of countries even though they may well be the happiest, smartest and least belligerent of all societies on the planet.
It seems we are unable to get beyond this testosterone driven male driven-madness that equates strength with goodness.
Probably we can all point to moments past in which strength lead to goodness (I can’t), and any claims of such instances would be rarities and despite that, demonstrations of potency should not be a reason for one to favour another.
Rather than turn to brute, rude and raw muscle to convince others of our legitimacy, it would be masterly if we stepped beyond those base human values and turned our attention, and so the spotlight allowing our visitor to see for themselves, to demonstrating our understanding of, and affiliation with, the power of ideas, ingenuity, literacy, art and our allegiance to the veracity of science, all of which stands beyond the superstition that has cruelled much of the world.
Our guard of honour should be an assembly of our finest minds – philosophers, artists, scientists, mathematicians, authors, doctors, chefs, famers and others who use intelligence and/or wisdom rather than force to advance a point of view.
It was author Hannah Arendt who said: “The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the more probable change is to a more violent world”.
Conscious of that, our visitors should leave with a clear understanding that ours is country that sees it future unfolding in a positive manner through the sweeping use of intelligence as opposed to force.
So, in short, let us abandon Australia’s identity being underpinned by violence and become a country that celebrates, and rewards, those who work to enrich the idea of non-violence among people.
Non-violence is inherently linked to peace, which interestingly is a concept that is also beyond the understanding of many for peace is not simply the absence of war.
Peace, strangely, is about aggression, but an aggression that is overtly about the pursuit of ideas and ways of living in which kindness is the preferred, and first option.

The tragedy of Afghanistan

An Australian warrior was killed recently at the opening of the new fighting season in Afghanistan.
That is distressing, for multiple reasons.

 Sgt Brett Wood, who
 was recenlty killed in
 Afghanistan.

The death of anyone, anywhere and for any reason should be sufficient to make us pause and reflect and, should the relationship be close, weep or at least feel a deep loss and sadness.
However, when the death results from a conflict in which our country should not be involved at all, it is more than distressing, it is a tragedy.
But there is more; to declare a dead soldier, who is simply a beautifully trained and equipped killer, as a warrior elevates him to a metaphorical status of which he is not worthy.
The term warrior elicits, in the imagination, images of one who is honourable, tenacious, courageous, faithful, intelligent and resourceful, and one with whom we would like to stand with when confronted by circumstances that were less than comforting.
Not for a second would I argue that Sgt Brett Wood didn’t have those qualities, but I object to the romantic interpretations of “warrior” being attached to him.
Further, I argue that the intelligence we suggest a warrior has is not something I would attribute to the broad sweep of our number who agreed that people with those skills should be sent to places like Afghanistan.
It is a mistake to describe our trained killers as warriors as in different circumstances they would be before our courts as murderers.
The romantic images that the term warrior summons are most certainly not applicable in a battlefield’s hellish-like realities.
The phrase “the fighting season” also alarms me as it brings a sad normality to the deathly struggles faced in Afghanistan that, in reality, should be extraordinarily rare, rather than as common as “the growing season”.
True, we should acknowledge Sgt Wood’s death and not, from our Prime Minister down, celebrate his dedication and sacrifice as that simply reinforces a culture that finds a perverse satisfaction in violence and war in what it considers the extension of a perceived greater good.
Humankind, one of the rare life forms that will kill its fellows with an irrational pleasure and for reasons that defy its inherent intelligence, is devoid of historical examples in which violence has resolved tensions.
Violence might resolve the immediate, but always brings with it unintended consequences.
Despatching young men and women to obscure places to risk death, to prosecute violence in the name of values not really understood is outrageously wrong.
Even though our values might have once been worthy, they have since been prostituted and corrupted by corporatism and militarism, with our alleged democracy being the realm of the few, rather than the many.
Three more have since died and so the tragedy continues.
(June 7, 2011)

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.

Picking through the numbers to piece together a budget, but picking apart the future

Councillors and their officers carefully picked over the numbers and pieced together what they believe will be a workable financial budget for the City of Greater Shepparton.

Human energy was the key to
feeding the nation when the
oil ran out.

However, rather than piece together numbers that will sustain the city, they have really picked apart the city’s future.

True, if tomorrow is to be like yesterday, then the budget, as presented recently, is what is needed.
Tomorrow, though, will not be like yesterday as the financial and physical infrastructure of the world, and by implication Greater Shepparton, is deteriorating and teetering on collapse.
Rather than budget for the creation of a city that allows for what contemporary society understands as growth, we should be budgeting for the creation of a resilient city, a city that will have the social and physical infrastructure that allows it to survive the unfolding shocks of the coming decades.
The Global Financial Crisis of a few years ago was little more than a curtain raiser to what we will see when the world exhausts its oil reserves and the chaos embedded in climate change begins to impact on the wellbeing of communities around the world.
Life’s fundamental needs – food, water and shelter – will become a priority and only those supported by a strong and resourceful community; a community in which those in charge have allowed for those impending difficulties, budgeted for and created a resilient infrastructure.
Our council should be re-zoning inner-city areas to encourage in-fill development to allow for residential living in the heart of the city and with it the resurgence of a market-like structure in the central business district so that most everything important to day-to-day living is within easy walking or cycling distance.
Just as was the case in Cuba in the 90s when, for multiple political reasons, its supply of oil vanished, food become such a priority that within a few years cities were growing, within their boundaries, some 70 per cent of their vegetables.
The dilemma was sprung upon the Cubans, but it is something about which we are aware and so our council should be encouraging all to grow what food they can and, beyond that, establishing community gardens at strategic places throughout the city, so creating neighbourhood resilience.
It should be promoting, and through zoning make possible, the creation of living areas in, around or on commercial premises meaning people can live close to their work, making travel by motor vehicle, which will ultimately be difficult, unnecessary.

The ride from here to the end of oil is going to be bumpy, but with the finish line in sight, each of us, and particularly our local council, needs to do what we can to prepare for coming, and certain, difficult social and ideological changes.

Breathe deep on ideas - the oxygen of life

Ideas are the oxygen of life.

Thomas Keneally - the author's
 keynote lecture at the
 University of Melbourne's
Festival of ideas will be streamed
 live into Shepparton.

Cleaning your teeth or putting a man on the moon where both, at first, little more than ideas.

That thought, or idea, expands, becomes intent and then, with effort, reality.

Leaning on that interpretation, ideas are integral to the human infrastructure and as such are the cornerstone of what it is that ignites and sustains love and, by contrast, they are also the starting point of all evil that has troubled humankind for millennia.

Ideas in our contemporary world are considered to be the province of the corporate world and academia, but in reality they are not exclusive to any group or individual, rather the property of all, especially in the disorder of democracy.

It is human nature to think and from those thoughts, random or otherwise, come ideas, but without the courage implementation demands they are little more than notions, like a sail without wind.

Ideas have seen the world crammed with people, ideas have created consumerism exhausting the world’s finite resources, ideas have led mankind down the self-destructive path of violence, it is ideas that have worsened our atmosphere and yet, it is ideas that will see us find a way around this impasse.

Shepparton people will have the opportunity to think about the importance of ideas when two keynote lectures from the University of Melbourne’s second Festivalof Ideas are streamed-live into the city in June.

Contemporary life is structured in a way the empties individuals of the courage it takes to pursue ideas, but learning that others think like you, or are at least adventurous in their thinking, is both fortifying and encouraging.

Like all other communities, the Greater Goulburn Valley has an urgent need for ideas.
Whatever your opinion about the refurbishment of the Murray Goulburn Irrigation system, it was an idea that brought millions of dollars to the area and inveigled a commercial brightness for an industry that had been struggling with a decade long drought.
However, to be successful an idea doesn’t need commercial worth and be lauded for its monetary value for just as easily, and probably more importantly to society’s wellbeing, it could be a purely social idea that improves the lot of all.
Contemporary life sees us locked into consuming daily doings that are rooted in economics and so permits little or no time for the reflection that allows for the conception of new ideas and along with that, space in our lives for the gestation, birth and nourishment of new ideas.
I urge you to allow yourself two hours later this month during which you can invigorate your thinking by listening to, and watching, two of Australia’s most powerful thinkers during Shepparton’s part in the University of Melbourne’s Festival of Ideas.