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

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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

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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.

Endorsement of Harper plan suggests government can't see Australia's troubles

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ny understanding of what troubles the world appears to escape Australia’s Federal Government.



Resource depletion and
 environmental concerns demand
 we slow our consumption, become
 poorer in a managed way and so
 work fewer hours every day.

Rather than be the solution to all our social problems, our prevailing market system is actually the cause.

The Harper Competition Review, which followed the election of our coalition Government and has been orchestrated by economists who are oblivious to what is happening in the world, or who have chosen to ignore realities, and yet makes recommendations that take us deeper into the difficulties that threaten humanity.

The “Harper Review” as it is known, wants to lift market restrictions to put consumer interests first, but actually ignores them completely.

It claims its proposals put consumers' interests ahead of commercial interests, firing new market opportunities. That is not true.

Contraction rather than expansion is what needed, if the world is, and by implication Australia, and so Shepparton, is to avoid a collision of circumstances, ranging from resource depletion and catastrophic climate disruption.

Consumers actually need an outbreak of sanity combined with an equally generous helping of good sense to help them understand that in a world facing energy, resource and climate constraints, they need to be building a world in which they live with less rather than more.

The implication there of course, is that rather than extending retail trading hours, we should be structuring our communities so lifestyles can be similar, although different, and trading hours significantly shorter.

The ills of the world can be attributed to many things, but it is difficult to argue that the market system, so lionized by so many, is not the root cause.

Our developed nations are simply too wealthy making consumption of energy and resource-rich goods and services extreme, and consequently pushing the world into serious ecological debt.

Rather than adopting the Harper Review plan of extending trading hours and effectively allowing a laissez-faire approach, we should be discussing and moving toward reducing and limiting times for traditional business.

Instead of a 24/7 arrangement for retail businesses, our communities should be looking to move in the opposite direction, that is a four-hour trading day, no overtime and no double shifts, but not including public services or primary producers.

Such a change would shift the emphasis away from simply making money and gathering “stuff” to allow people time in their communities to bond with those around them and build resilience in their neighbourhoods.

With just four hours on the job, people would live closer to their work and so would be able to walk or cycle, eliminating the need for road transport, making a significant difference to personal costs and easing the worsening of human damage to earth’s ecological systems, along with being far more resource efficient.

The GV Community Fund and Slap Tomorrow have worked together to bring author, teacher, editor and environmentalist, Kerryn Higgs to talk about aspects of this and her new book, “Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet” in Shepparton at the Harder Auditorium on April 29 at 6:30 for 7:00pm.

Tickets at $10 for the event can be bought at Collins Booksellers at 262 Maude St, Shepparton, or from Andrea McNab at the GV Community Fund at 5832 8221.

Public art is a good idea, but the proposed new SAM is a bad idea

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hen is a good thing a bad idea?

The idea of building a new art museum in Shepparton ticks all bar one of the boxes and interestingly that last box is the biggest of all and the one that really matters.



An artist's impression of what is proposed for 
Shepparton - a new SAM at Victoria Park Lake.

Yes, a new art museum for the city is a wonderful idea for art is at the heart of everything we do and so to celebrate and recognise its importance through the creation of the beautiful lake-side proposed complex suggests a coming of age for the city.

Everything about the idea appears to be as it should, except for its timing.

A collision of world events suggest the city’s interest and emphasis should be about building resilience, entrenching what exists and underscoring the strengths of our culture to ensure we can arrive as unscathed as possible through the unfolding challenges.

Like many others, I endorse the importance of emphasizing art, but rather than committing our resources to create something new, we should be exploring every avenue to use what exists, even if that demands some changes to our behaviour.

Much of what presently happens at the city’s offices in Welsford St could be, thanks to modern technology, undertaken and completed almost anywhere in the city. It is not essential to have all administrative staff at Eastbank.

Yes, keep the customer/ratepayer contact people, the Mayor’s office, the council chambers, and any other pieces of the operation vital to the daily public operation of the city.

The Shepparton Art Museum (SAM) already has space in the building and so the area cleared of relocated administrative staff could easily be incorporated into a restructured art museum.

With costs far below that of what is proposed near Victoria Park Lake, SAM and the existing library building could connected to create a beautiful centre of the city-community facility that would answer our civic needs.

Yes, the new SAM is a good idea, but its timing is bad for rather than such wonderful physical city enhancements, the city should be acknowledging the changes that are settling upon because of global warming and along with that playing its part in cutting the world’s carbon dioxide emissions by at least 80 per cent with a decade or two.

Building a new, stand-alone art museum that oozes embedded energy is contrary to an efficient and sustainable city future.

Yes, let us use what we have, modifying what exists, provide the services we want and need and yet do it thoughtfully in terms of our carbon dioxide emissions.

Yes, despite the opinions of the doubters, skeptics and others, we have changed our climate system, subsequently the benign weather that once was is gone and we are quickly moving into an era in which we will need every resource we can gather.