Soliloquy for One Dead
Bruce Dawe

Ah, no, Joe, you never knew
the whole of it, the whistling
which is only the wind in the chimney’s
smoking belly, the footsteps on the muddy
path that are always somebody else’s.
I think of your limbs down there, softly
becoming mineral, the life of grasses,
and the old love of you thrusts the tears
up into my eyes, with the family aware
and looking everywhere else.
Sometimes when summer is over the land,
when the heat quickens the deaf timbers,
and birds are thick in the plumbs again,
my heart sickens, Joe, calling
for the water of your voice and the gone
agony of your nearness. I try hard
to forget, saying: If God wills,
it must be so, because of
His goodness, because-
but the grasshopper memory leaps
in the long thicket, knowing no ease. Ah, Joe,
you never knew the whole of it…

Jefferson, Pope Innocent IV, and American Indians
by Cecil Poole

Meriwether Lewis and William Clark were commissioned by the polymath lawyer, plantation owner and President, Thomas Jefferson to traverse the continent from St Louis on the Mississippi through the “Louisiana Purchase” to the mouth of the Columbia River on the Pacific coast in Oregon territory.  The purpose of the mission was to establish American sovereignty over the land occupied by numerous Indian tribes along the Missouri River and to circumvent European, particularly British, claims to the Oregon Territory.   Lewis and Clark took over two years to complete their mission, from May 1804 to September 1806.

Academic Indian Lawyer Robert J Miller wrote of this expedition in “Native America, Discovered and Conquered, Thomas Jefferson, Lewis and Clark, and Manifest Destiny” (2006).  This book “traces the racist, greedy religiosity of Manifest Destiny used to seize Indian land, especially in Oregon, showing it also as the basis for laws applied to Native Americans that appallingly continue into the present.”   Here is part of his introduction to that work.

“My Tribe, and many other American Indian tribes and Indian people, were conflicted by the observance of the Lewis and Clark anniversary.  Similar to how Indian tribes had viewed the five hundred year anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ “discovery” of the New World, the vast majority of Indians and tribes did not want to “celebrate” the Lewis and Clark expedition.  Instead of something to celebrate, Indians saw the expedition as the forerunner of centuries of conquest, oppression and destruction.  Understandably, tribes were very cautious about becoming involved with the anniversary.  Consequently, tribal representatives and Indian members of the National Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Committee communicated this concern.  The committee came to understand this issue and expressly decided not to call the Lewis and Clark anniversary a “celebration” because it realised that this was not the case for American Indians.  The National Committee called the event a “commemoration”, a remembrance of an important event in American history.  But the only aspect of this anniversary that Indian people and nations wanted to celebrate was that they were still in existence even after the Lewis and Clark expedition and American Manifest Destiny had rolled over them.  The Indian nations are still here, as they had been for thousands of years before Lewis and Clark, and as they will be for thousands of years into the future.  This is something worth celebrating.”

Interestingly the Doctrine of Discovery can be traced back to the Crusades to recover the Holy Lands in 1096 – 1271.  Pope Innocent IV wrote extensively around 1240, underpinning much of the “legal” basis for the Doctrine of Discovery that was formalised in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by Franciscus de Victoria and Hugo Grotius among others.  Pope Innocent considered whether it was legitimate for Christians to invade infidel lands, and answered yes.  He focussed on the right of Christians to dispossess infidels of their dominium, their governmental sovereignty and their property.  His finding was based on “the papacy’s divine mandate to care for the entire world.”

Make of that what you will.  Passive Complicity will look at this in more detail in coming weeks.

The Light of the World
by Paddy 0′Cearmada

William Holman Hunt painted his famous picture in 1854.  Depicting the figure of Jesus carrying a lamp and knocking on an overgrown door it took as its inspiration the verse from the Book of Apocalypse (3:20) Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if any man hear My voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with Me.  As a member of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, Hunt was fascinated by mysticism and symbolism – the door lacks a handle so can only be opened from within, representing in Hunt’s words the ‘obstinately shut mind’.

This famous painting in a later version toured the world in 1900 drawing huge crowds wherever it went, including Australia.  Maybe it should tour again, perhaps to Canberra.

Tony Abbott’s statement that many women are knocking at the door of his recently announced Cabinet is a modern example of the ‘obstinately shut mind’.   Triumphant as a new Prime Minister he had the power to open that door, and the fact that only one woman has been admitted is a disgrace.  To say that no other woman could hold such a position, and to hide behind merit as the reason, beggars belief.  The new line-up is as average as any other Cabinet in recent memory and all Ministers of any political persuasion grow into their role.

As a symbol of what is to come this action speaks louder than words, and says clearly that over half the population has no real place in his imagination.

STOP PRESS!!!
Cockburn and Poole through Passive Complicity bring you the 0′Cearmada Compendium “Election 2013”.  This is the definitive work outlining in detail the finer machinations of the 2013 Australian Federal Election.  0′Cearmada’s writing will re-establish your faith in democracy, and enthuse you to ask “when can we have another”.
Published on the softest of recycled paper stock, with precisely placed perforations this work deserves a place on your bedside table or any of your other regular reading places.  In fact we see a need for two copies in every home.
NOTE:  Only available on line as a digital copy, this may not be suitable for the uses suggested.
AND THERE IS MORE.  We have available the most gorgeous Broadsheet of the Election one metre high by .3m wide, at only $10 each.  With each poster purchased you also get the full compendium.

THIS WEEK

Paddy 0′Cearmada wrapped up the election (almost) with Unrepresentative swill.  He says of the Senate it ‘has become the kind of democratic expression of the truly weird that only a continent possessing the last of the monotremes could produce.’

Cecil Poole and Quentin Cockburn combined with a piece comparing the influence of Sophie Mirabella to that of Pauline Hanson in that their extremism gave room for otherwise despicable policies and behaviour to appear normal.

‘Prior to the Industrial Revolution people knew their place.  ….. Then along came canals and turnips and steam engines and people began to dream.’ wrote Tarquin O’Flaherty in the second instalment of ‘Man as Machine’, (read the first part here), 

Two pieces specifically spoke of threats to democracy.  The first by Jesselyn Radack: Bradley Manning’s conviction sends a chilling message – The Washington Post,  2 August 2013 where she argues ‘The work of the government is supposed to be public and people’s personal lives private, not the other way around.’

The second, by George Monbiot in two parts is on Chemical Weapons and the UN Security Council.  (Second part here) He says that the permanent member of the Security Council (US, Russia, France, UK, China) ‘have collaborated…. in a colonial carve-up, through which these nations can pursue their own corrupt interests at the expense of peace and global justice.’

Saturday’s MDFF was the promised rejoinder to the previous two dispatches that  tackled stereotyping and its nefarious results.  This piece argued for the clear distinction between racial and cultural prejudice, a most valuable contribution.

Poetry Sunday brought W B Yeats’ Leda and the Swan, with comprehensive comments from our Poetry Editor Ira Maine.

“A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.”
  

And, dear reader, please feel free to add comments about this and any of our postings.

Regards
Cecil Poole

The Last Stand, Sophie and Ned
by Paddy 0′Cearmada

In 2003 I was invited to attend the Glenrowan Siege Dinner.  (Glenrowan, 150 miles north of Melbourne, was the place where Ned Kelly*, Australia’s most famous bushranger was captured after a siege.)  It was held on the exact anniversary of the end of siege, 28 June, near the siege site, in a large marquee.  For such a grim piece of history on a freezing and clear night it was in its own way a jolly event and the warm bush hospitality created a festive atmosphere not unlike the party that had taken place 123 years before in Ann Jones’ Glenrowan Inn.

There is no such thing as a free lunch or a free dinner.  I was there as the then public custodian of a large collection of Ned Kelly material, and at the time there was some enthusiasm for gathering all that remains of Ned and his gang, plus much of what has come after including the Nolan series of paintings and installing them in a vast museum to be built on the site.  This impressive act of civic boosterism had its origin in a request from the good burghers of Glenrowan for funding from Tourism Victoria for a new toilet block.  Seized by an enthusiastic bureaucrat as a once in a lifetime opportunity to create the next ‘Sovereign Hill’, dollars well in excess of the cost of new dunnies were soon spent on consultants and feasibility reports.  And I was at the dinner to be cajoled and persuaded, and as I soon discovered romanced.

I was introduced to the still quite new local Federal member for the seat of Indi, Sophie Panopoulos, and when it came time to be seated I discovered I had been given pride of place seated at her right hand.  To her left was a very handsome and fit local farmer, her current beau as it happened, but looking quite forlorn.  The Baileys Shiraz flowed, and so did the conversation.  Sophie’s partner it transpired was in the midst of a bitter divorce and his unhappiness was compounded by the fact that one of his daughters was a waitress at the dinner and his estranged wife another guest.  In the kind of games played at such times the mother was seeking to make sure that he could not talk to his child as it was not his contact week.

Sophie seemed oblivious to this drama and focused her full attention on me.  With all the charm that a St Catherine’s education can instil, she worked her way through the entire repertoire.  There was the flickering of the eyelashes; attempts at coquettish pursing of crimson lips;  the exaggerated laughter at the merest joke, head tossed back but always with an eye on me to make sure I noticed; the hand rested on my forearm, or more provocatively ……  Not for the first time I was happy to be gay for none of it was working on me, and my eyes when I could risk a glance were for the heartbroken boyfriend with his heaving chest, sinewy forearms and well-formed biceps flexing under his tight shirt.  Surely, I thought, a bit of man-love would make his life better.

The evening ended with all loves lost and unrequited lust.  As I made my way through the freezing night to Glenrowan’s one motel the crystalline sky looked so brittle that one well aimed stone could shatter it into a billion brilliant shards.  Entering my very cold room I contemplated a shower to cleanse me of all the attention and to warm me, but the thin brown trickle from the shower head made me wary of triggering hypothermia.  I climbed fully clothed into a bed with a mattress that seemed made from the off-cuts of the armour forged for the Kelly gang and attempted sleep.

The Museum didn’t happen.  The City of Greater Wangaratta saw a huge white elephant and rejected a trumped up feasibility study at a meeting where I was able to share one of my favourite jokes from my father’s repertoire.  A country Shire Council meeting was debating the installation of a urinal in the local Park and while there was support, the President was adamantly opposed.  In the tea-break one Shire Councillor took the time to explain to him what a urinal was, and when the meeting recommenced he announced ‘I’m in favour of the urinal and while we’re at it we should build an arsenal as well’.  The good folk of Glenrowan got their toilet block, and the hapless farmer didn’t marry Ms Panopoulos, who found instead another local, Greg Mirabella.  I often wonder about the farmer and hope he broke free, maybe making it to Sydney and parading at least once down Oxford Street in Mardi Gras.

And as for Sophie?  Well it seems her adopted community has had enough.  Perhaps with her Parliamentary Pension she can go to Charm School and practice her wiles.  Given her deficit she will be there a while.

* Edward “Ned” Kelly (June 1854 or 1855 – 11 November 1880)[1] was an Irish Australian bushranger. Kelly’s legacy is controversial; many consider him to be a folk hero and symbol of Irish Australian resistance against the Anglo-Australian ruling class, while others emphasise his involvement in killing.

Food
by Cecil Poole

Food has always been important to me.   Fresh, home grown food more so.  Vegetable gardens, herbs, mutton, poultry.  With bursts of seasonal foods, like field mushrooms, asparagus, and the fabulous black mulberries.  Eating in South East Asia seems to me the pinnacle of fresh food, with the vast array of greens, peppers, lemon grass, cilantro, the basils and mints, all making the most of the meat proteins available.

My daughter in law, (hereafter The d.i.l.) here in North Carolina, has always been enthusiastic about searching out local food.  On my frequent visits she invariably takes me to one farm or another.  These farms grow a multiplicity of foods, producing eggs, greens, roots vegetables, fruits and berries, corn (of course), milk, and meats of all descriptions.  They are mostly organic farms, they use guard dogs to protect the free range chickens.  I see Great Pyrenees, Anatolian Shepherds and, perhaps the most common, Maremma.  These dogs are extraordinary to watch, I’ve seen them lying seemingly asleep, with chickens eating grass between the dogs stretched out forelegs.

When we visit farms my young grandchildren come too.  I sometimes think they love stomping in the puddles and in the mud above all else

We get our eggs from one of the staff at the Day Care, she has fifty or sixty layers.  In a dozen eggs we can have quite an array of different eggs – light blue/green, pure white, brown, speckled, large, small, even some double yolks, just as you would expect from a non-factory farm.  The eggs have beautiful rich deep coloured yolks, and whites that whip up to a good stiff peak.  The d.i.l. and I have yet to work out the seasonal difference in the eggs, the difference that their food makes to the physiology of the egg – what it is that makes them better for one sort of use over another.  The Swiss, reputedly, had a very good understanding of the seasonal differences in eggs, and would cook accordingly.

The d.i.l. goes to some length to buy local foods.  I asked her why this was so important to her and she answered that she felt better knowing exactly where her food was coming from, knowing who had grown it.  She wanted to be able to show her children where it came from, to share the wonder that is nature providing.

I thought about this term – “nature providing”.  I thought about how accepting this term is, how non deterministic.  About how different this is from the agriculture I have been part of, where I, the farmer worked almost against nature, trying to control every variable, building myself up as the grower of the food and fibre.

Then I thought of my times in the Tanami desert of central Australia, home of the Walpri people.  The times when they generously took me into their country and showed me “nature providing”, in the form of bush potato (yams), honey ants, goanna (the cooked tail is the part given to me), kangaroo – again the tail is a delicacy, witchetty grubs, and bush tomatoes – just a small array of the foods “nature provides” in this “desert”.

It seemed as though the Walpri believed that nature would willingly provide.   We, of course, know better.  Force, coercion, control and plenty of inputs are the determinants of providing in our society. Obviously.

Ah well, back to the factory (farm).

To be continued

Man as Machine (part three)
by TARQUIN O’FLAHERTY.

Christopher Marlowe was stabbed to death in a London pub.  He was 29 and a spy in the pay of Sir Francis Walsingham, the Virgin Queen’s secretary and England’s Spymaster.  Though deemed accidental, it is widely held that his death was political.

Besides spying, Marlowe had a part-time job.  He was the most popular playwright in England.

The English are a strange race.  They value honour above all else, and especially when it’s acquisition requires treachery and murder.  The country’s single minded pursuit of honour through treachery has become so ingrained that its peoples consider the appellation ‘Perfidious Albion’ a hard earned, worthwhile, blue ribbon award.  (Perfidious, of course, means treacherous, faithless, deceitful and false).

It mattered not a jot to Walsingham that Shakespeare worshipped the ground Kit Marlowe walked on.  Recruited (*like Burgess and Maclean) while studying at Cambridge, the author of Dr Faustus and the Jew of Malta became a part-time spy who, at the age of 29, was deemed to have outlived his usefulness.  A pub brawl was concocted, Marlowe died, and a plea of self defence got his fellow ‘brawlers’ completely off the hook.  It was, of course, a complete and utter coincidence that those involved in the death were both Walsingham’s men.

Marlowe’s ten years of part-time spying was a little unusual.  Generally the English spy business tended to be a bit more haphazard, with agents recruited on the spot when ever the need arose.  It wasn’t until the late 19^th century that a proper professional approach was adopted and spying became a recognised profession, like undertaking, or embalming, or hanging.

William Melville was born in 1850, in Sneem, County Kerry, in the south of Ireland.  His parents had the local pub and bakery but in the wake of the Famine, which both devastated and depopulated the country, a decision was made to sell up and move to England.  By the early 1860’s, this entire Irish Catholic family had sold up and were trading in London.

William worked with his parents to help establish the business, but his sights were set elsewhere.  He joined the London police force in 1872.  Ten years later he was involved in the founding of the Irish Special Branch whose brief was to root out Anarchists and Fenians.  He was brought back to London in 1888 to help protect both the Shah of Persia and the Royal Family against an assortment of plots.  Five years later he is astonishingly, Superintendent of Scotland Yard Special Branch, a semi secret organisation with a shadowy network of informers and spies.  By 1901 he is liasing with the German Secret Service to protect the Kaiser who is in London to attend Queen Victoria’s funeral.  Throughout all of this, Melville has been attempting to establish, through the War Office, a properly defined secret intelligence agency.  By 1909 The War Office has agreed to his requests and new Departments of Military Intelligence are established, numbering One to Nineteen.  Amongst these are the now familiar MI.5 and MI.6.  By the time WW1 swings into action, Melville is absolute head of the British Secret Service and has established a school for spies in Whitehall.

From now on the Head of this highly secret organisation will be referred to only by a single letter from the alphabet, which may or may not be the initial letter of that person’s surname.

There can be no doubt that this is where Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels took the idea, and even the initial ‘M’.

Sadly, Melville died of kidney failure in 1918.

His son, Sir James Melville K.C. eminent barrister, MP for Gateshead, and Solicitor General in Ramsay McDonald’s government, appealed unsuccessfully against the obscenity decision in “The Well of Loneliness’ case.

‘The Well of Loneliness’ (1928) written by Radclyffe Hall, was a lesbian novel which utterly scandalised English society at the time.

*Burgess and Maclean, along with Blunt and Philby, fed classified information to the Soviet Union from Britain from the 1930’s to the 1950’s until they were finally exposed.  They had been recruited by the Russians while still attending university at Cambridge. They were called “The Cambridge Four’.

TO BE CONTINUED

by George Monbiot, (first Published in The Guardian, this is an edited extract)

Smallpox has been eliminated from the human population, but two nations – the US and Russia – insist on keeping the pathogen in cold storage. They claim their purpose is to develop defences against possible biological weapons attack, but most experts in the field consider this to be nonsense. While raising concerns about each other’s possession of the disease, they have worked together to bludgeon the other members of the World Health Organisation, which have pressed them to destroy their stocks.

In 2001 the New York Times reported that, without either Congressional oversight or a declaration to the Biological Weapons Convention, “the Pentagon has built a germ factory that could make enough lethal microbes to wipe out entire cities”. The Pentagon claimed the purpose was defensive but, developed in contravention of international law, it didn’t look good. The Bush government also sought to destroy the Biological Weapons Convention as an effective instrument by scuttling negotiations over the verification protocol required to make it work.

Looming over all this is the great unmentionable: the cover the US provides for Israel’s weapons of mass destruction. It’s not just that Israel – which refuses to ratify the Chemical Weapons Convention – has used white phosphorus as a weapon in Gaza (when deployed against people, phosphorus meets the convention’s definition of “any chemical which through its chemical action on life processes can cause death, temporary incapacitation or permanent harm”).

It’s also that, as the Washington Post points out: “Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile results from a never-acknowledged gentleman’s agreement in the Middle East that as long as Israel had nuclear weapons, Syria’s pursuit of chemical weapons would not attract much public acknowledgement or criticism.” Israel has developed its nuclear arsenal in defiance of the non-proliferation treaty, and the US supports it in defiance of its own law, which forbids the disbursement of aid to a country with unauthorised weapons of mass destruction.

As for the norms of international law, let’s remind ourselves where the US stands. It remains outside the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, after declaring its citizens immune from prosecution. The crime of aggression it committed in Iraq – defined by the Nuremberg tribunal as “the supreme international crime” – goes not just unpunished but also unmentioned by anyone in government. The same applies to most of the subsidiary war crimes US troops committed during the invasion and occupation. Guantánamo Bay raises a finger to any notions of justice between nations.

None of this is to exonerate Bashar al-Assad’s government – or its opponents – of a long series of hideous crimes, including the use of chemical weapons. Nor is it to suggest that there is an easy answer to the horrors in Syria.

But Obama’s failure to be honest about his nation’s record of destroying international norms and undermining international law, his myth-making about the role of the US in world affairs, and his one-sided interventions in the Middle East, all render the crisis in Syria even harder to resolve. Until there is some candour about past crimes and current injustices, until there is an effort to address the inequalities over which the US presides, everything it attempts – even if it doesn’t involve guns and bombs – will stoke the cynicism and anger the president says he wants to quench.

During his first inauguration speech Barack Obama promised to “set aside childish things”. We all knew what he meant. He hasn’t done it.

Leda and the Swan
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
                                  Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

Comments by Ira Maine, Poetry Editor

Zeus, the most powerful of the Greek gods, had the habit of straying from the nuptial bed.
He is particularly taken with Leda, wife to Tyndareus, King of Sparta.
Taking the form of a swan, and pursued by an eagle, he seeks refuge in Leda’s arms, whom he promptly ravishes.
Leda’s union  with Zeus creates, or in Yeat’s words,’engenders’, Helen, Castor and Pollux, and Clytemnestra.
Helen is Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman in the world, over whom the Trojan wars will be fought.
Clytemnestra, will be wife to Agamemnon, King of Mycenae, who declares war on Troy, and she will have him murdered.
Castor and Pollux, twin brothers, play an essential role in the Trojan Wars and become the constellation Gemini.
So, Yeat’s poem observes that Zeus’ rape of Leda literally creates the Trojan Wars.

‘A shudder in the loins engenders there
ZEUS’ ORGASM CREATES  A FUTURE WHERE

The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
TROY IS DESTROYED AND BURNING,

And Agamemnon dead…’
THE KING OF MYCENAE IS MURDERED.

Briefly, Helen is married to Menelaus, Agamemnon’s brother.  Paris falls in love with Helen and spirits her off to Troy.  Enraged by this insult to his brother and his kingship, Agamemnon demands she be returned.  His demands are not met so he goes to war with Troy.
While Agamemnon is at war, his wife, Clytemnestra is carrying on with Aegisthus.  When Agamemnon returns from the war he is murdered either by his wife, her lover, or as a joint enterprise.
Finally, Yeats leaves a question hanging …

‘…did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?’

Note here that Yeats does not say ‘wisdom’; the word he uses is ‘knowledge’.
In other words, ‘…so mastered by the brute blood of the air..’ she perhaps did not, or could not bring anything of herself to her offspring.  Everything her children became was the result of her, a mortal, being ‘mastered’ by a god, by THE god, Zeus.  Zeus knew, perhaps, what the future required, and created it through Leda.

Wisdom might have decided against this course.  Mere ‘knowledge’ of what the future requires singularly fails to provide one with the wisdom to prevent it.

IRA MAINE, Poetry Editor

Our last two Dispatches have dealt with the issue of stereotyping and its role in racist and discriminatory behaviour and policy.   Today’s anonymous Post is a rejoinder to that debate and opens new ground, ground that Passive Complicity sees as a highly fertile field, one that may promise a rich harvest.

Previously:
Myself, I have often made fun of ‘matters German’. A group of Germans telling jokes: “Drei und vierzig (43)… Ha Ha Ha , neunzehn (19)…Ha Ha Ha…achtundzwanzig (28) …Ha Ha Ha… und zo weiter”
Not to mention the German Coastguard  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yR0lWICH3rY
Very funny Frank. On reflection this is based on prejudice and if most Germans were brown or black it would be called racism. Over the years I may have unwittingly hurt many a German’s feelings. Of this I’m not proud. Prejudice without pride.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVN_0qvuhhw”

Tim Minchin is very good!
There is prejudice on the basis of race (racism), and then there is prejudice on the basis of culture (culturism). They are often confused because race is often a convenient stereotype to identify culture, but they are actually different things.

Racism is fairly obviously stupid…aside from the stupidity of prejudice on the basis of any sort of difference, there is less biological difference between races than there is between random individuals of the same race.  My favorite quote from the wikipedia page on race and genetics is this;

“From a scientific point of view, the concept of race has failed to obtain any consensus; none is likely […] the major stereotypes, all based on skin color, hair color and form, and facial traits, reflect superficial differences that are not confirmed by deeper analysis with more reliable genetic traits…”

However, culturism is a far more subtle and difficult thing to argue against. It typically manifests as; “I’m not racist. I believe that everyone, regardless of race, should be free to live just like me.” It is not racist, but it is denying people the freedom to live differently. It’s hard to argue against because although most people can understand race is a minor and arbitrary difference, they struggle to understand and accept that people would genuinely want to live a different way. To them it just looks like the “wrong way” that needs to be corrected.

It is very hard to get people to understand and accept cultural differences. It’s actually easier for people to accept cultural differences if they don’t understand them… it’s easier to accept something if you don’t realize just how different it is. This is why people in Melbourne are more accepting of Aboriginal rights than people in Alice-Springs. Once you begin to realize how big the differences are, it’s a whole new level of understanding before you can accept them.

I think it’s too hard to educate people to the “acceptance point”. It’s much easier to argue for tolerance… that people should have the freedom to live how they like, even if it is the “wrong way”. You can also argue for the benefits of diversity… it makes the world more interesting and adaptable if we are not all clones of each other.

Editors note:  I would like to see more discussion on the idea of ‘tolerance’ and  ‘acceptance’.  Where does ‘judgement’  or ‘non-judgement’ fit into this?