Train station truths

It's been a long time since I've posted, having switched to Linux recently and spent months fiddling around with that instead, but I'm back, at least for a while. (Not that anyone is listening, I should be calling this my personal rant page because that's more or less what it's for.)

It's been an even longer time since I caught a train into the city, having grown up, moved to the country and learned to drive cars. But I caught one in the other day, to take my son to his pediatrician, and it bought back some amazing memories of being seventeen with a group of friends and a skateboard, of being nineteen with purple dreadlocks and twelve up Docs. Melbourne is like a great, dirty carnival. Flinders Street station is constructed of cream, wooden, bowed architecture, with old-fashioned font pronouncing the station names, empty red brick buildings, and red iron railings with curlicues at every entrance and exit. From Flinders Street you can just see the colourful trams chug along down Swanston Street, a road that looks grotesquely fun-fairish in appearance with its phantasmagoria of lights and shop sizes and colours, even the people are sort of fun-fairish, strange and eclectic creatures, as dirty appearing as the city: as if it had rubbed off on them despite their morning showers and favorite clothes.

I love it all. What a great city.

At Hawthorn someone has spray painted the words:

"Capitalism is Cannibalism."

I couldn't help thinking about it over and over again as I stared out the train window, about how true it was: that the nature of capitalism makes us eat each other to survive. It was an ugly piece of writing, with ugly words in it, but it was profoundly true.

What the hell is going ON?

What's driving this new puritanical pyche in our culture? Have we gone stark raving fucking MAD??

I could almost understand the ban on smoking. I'm not a smoker myself but have I been in the past. Still, even as a non-smoker, I was irked by the Puritanical Police dictating to people how to live their lives. There aren't many addictive substances that society allows. Which is a good thing. But let's face it, we're human. We have flaws. We need to make some allowances for this. We need to give people some 'breathing space' when it comes to making their own choices. Granted big tobacco corporations are making a fortune trading in on people's lives, and this is one of the reasons I could come to terms with the puritanical police starting their assault against smoking, but simultaneously, people make choices. And often they make informed choices. No one in this day and age can deny they haven't been given plenty of information about the dangers of smoking. We need to stop sueing the shit out of each other and take some personal responsibility.

Now it's one thing to fight against the big tobacco corporations who hide information from the public about the dangers of their product, or who manipulate people into buying a product that they know is dangerous, and it's another thing when the Puritanical Police start banning of all smoking in public arenas. Yet even this is understandable. It's only a natural progression from understanding how passive smoking affects non-smokers. But it's another thing again when the New Puritans begin to take actions against what people do in their own homes. Things start to take a sinister twist right there.

No one wants to think that some poor unsuspecting children are getting sick from second-hand smoke, but logic would tell you that most responsible smoking parents don't want to hurt their children and will find alternative ways of protecting them from their own habits, once they understand the dangers. So educate them. But don't go into people's homes and start dictating to them how they should live, taking away their rights. What do you want to do next, stick a brain-washing television that can never be turned off in the corner of every lounge room? We might as well all move to North Korea then! I hate to tell you this people, but work in aged-care long enough and you realise that most people die of cancer related illness if they live long enough. .. It's not nice, it hurts but the truth is we're all DIEING.

My understanding is that these New Putirtans want to eventually ban smoking outright, and I can feel some of my civil liberties being eroded again, the right to to make mistakes, the right to human error, the right to regret in the face of my bad choices if I so decide, are drying up in a puddle. They may be well-meaning, on a campaign to save every life from their owir own horrible cancer-ridden fate, but will you stop for god's sake people! Will you stop already! You've fought the good fight, you've kicked corporate murderer arse, not let us all be adults and take responsibility for ourselves and will you accept that some of us are going to make painful and irreversible mistakes at times? It's called humanity. Stop trying to clean us up, clean death up. If you want to continue this fight, kill two birds with one stone and keep aim at the tobacco corporations, bring them down. At least that way death won't be wholesale.

And now it's the grog they want to start fiddling with. Some people are alcoholics, but many many people aren't, and oh man, if you come between me and my bottles of wine of a Friday and Saturday night I won't be a happy girl. I play the game every weekday and on the weekend I want to relax and become a little irresponsible - forget the fact that I am actually dieing slowly day-by-day just through the very process of living. Just have some fun. Just enjoy being alive in the moment and stop worrying about money and work and the strain of having to support my life in this god forsaken capitalist rat race. All the little industrial ants out there, who don't have access to the same health care system as the elite classes, who won't live as long anyway because their work is harder and the time in their day for themselves and their families is shorter, who are aware of their own mortality anyhow because of it all - just want a drink sometimes to forget. Some of my best childhood memories were sitting around the floor in my parent's kitchen on the weekends looking at Seventies album covers while the adults got 'happy' and communal. Not all drinkers are alcoholics, that's a personal problem. And many things contain poisons. You cannot eradicate all the poisions from our environment. You can only learn to live with them relatively safely.

Oh and this morning on TV it was JUMPING CASTLES. Because now jumping castles are dangerous. Jumping Castles - are you people serious? Sure, someone could actually DIE falling off the side of a jumping castle, but most people don't! Our kids have already lost the water slide and the slip-and-slide and the garden sprinkler through water shortages, and you're going to take another slightly dangerous and exhilarating opportunity for fun away from them. Risk taking rides can teach children the art of self-control in the face of an out-of-control situation.

Oh for fuck's sake. Yes we can die smoking. We can become alcoholics. We can die in a car accident, a plan accident, we can choke on a chicken bone, we can fall off trampolines and jumping castles and break our necks, we can get bitten by sting-rays, have allergic reactions to bees, get bitten by a spider, we can take a wrong step on a stair and trip to our deaths, we can wake up one day and have a deadly disease. We can give up smoking and go to the doctor only to be told we've contracted a deadly STD, passed on to us unsuspectingly by our cheating spouse. True, most sane people will want to minimize the odds of dying by stopping behaviour they know will contribute to the chances of an early death. But some won't.

New Puritans, you cannot control humanity, you cannot control some people's violent disregard for their own safety. The best thing you can do to protect the general public against themselves, is educate them. There are some substances, activities and behaviours that do need state interference because the dangers are so high. And it's possible that smoking may be one of those and I'm just not ready to receive this because I so much hate the notion that I could smoke or not smoke at my own discretion, but by-and-large, I suspect it's not because of the interest of the state for the individual, as much as it is in the interest of the the state for a robust, healthy and majorly efficient and productive work force work force. And of course whose crazy enough to argue when the benefits are personal. But are they really?

We're really beginning to police ourselves like a fundamental religious organisation aimed at eradicating anything we consider 'evil.' And evil seems to be in everything and everywhere we look, as it is also for a fanatic.

People, ugly and as scary as it is, even for me, life is about RISK, and inevitably DEATH. And if we just accepted that we'd have less people running around sueing each other for breathing on us when they smoked, for making wrong decisions in the operating room, for letting our children go on their jumping castles. We'd be more forgiving of human error and inevitably more compassionate to our brothers and sisters. We'd be more human.

Understand this and come to peace with it: EVERYTHING IS POTENTIALLY DANGEROUS!!

What am I?

... that's what The Bunyip of Berkley's Creek kept asking anyway.

Fortunately for the Bunyip of Berkley's creek, it didn't matter what he was. As soon as he saw himself reflected in the lady bunyip, he accepted himself as the same kind and lived happily ever after. Maybe he should have looked at this website?

http://uqconnect.net/~zzlaueli/bunyips.htm

At this point in life, I've decided I'm a Socialist, hardcore feminist who likes to wear dresses and make-up, (don't scoff this is totally justifiable and can easily be argued as irrelevant to any true feminist motivation for gender equality, which doesn't demand we negate or deny our natural biological urges to appear attractive. Gender equality is about mutual respect and appreciation for differences and what each gender brings to society, not about revenge or blind rebellion,) Christian, Taoist, Metaphysical Panantheist, (as opposed to Pantheism itself.)

http://www.panentheism.com/

I'm huge on Christ, and on Lao Tze Tung, both of whose teachings are not as far removed as one might think. I believe Christ's teachings have been perverted and hijacked for political and personal gain and the original church bears little resemblance to his original teachings I think if Jesus' teachings were put into practice, they would appear Socialist in nature.

But why doesn't Socialism work? My theory is, because like any political ideal, although the ideals are good, put man into the equation, and you will inevitably have problems. There is no known system we have yet created that has eradicated the ability for men with wrong motivations and wicked plans from infiltrating those systems, and I cannot imagine there ever will be. We consistently make the same mistake of assuming that in the places we don't safeguard against wrong doing, men will govern themselves to do the right thing. (Thatcherism was a good example of this.) But at least some political systems were designed with predominant altruistic concerns. I find Capitalism to be ruthlessly individualistic, at the detriment of society as a whole.

Still, Socialism needs a bit of a spruce up don't you think? Plug up a few holes? As does Christianity? Taoism has fared a little better so far.

Brat Camp (2) and Big Brother: Teenagers and women.

In the second show of Brat Camp, the the kid’s begin turning on one another.

Rob said to me as we watched them, “oooh great can’t wait for that episode, yeah that’s what happens, I see it in the class room all the time,” (I could see he was getting some depraved sense of schadenfreude from the whole show,) “Once the authority has complete control, then the kids start attacking each other.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Dunno,” he shrugged. “I just know that’s what happens.”

“Maybe it’s because there’s no point in challenging an authority that has firmly and unquestionably instituted it’s position, so they move on down to the next level where they can still have some hope of exercising control over people who are still in a struggle for power with one another?”

“Yeah that would be it, " he agreed.

I wondered how Chomsky would explain this in regard to his theory that the natural human response hardwired into our brain is to never allow ourselves to be fully subjugated by totally oppressive political systems. Maybe the kid's responses were a perfect example of how humans instinctively rebel against tyrannical systems, (because let's face it, regardless of the fact that the system seemed to be effective in changing the kid's behaviour, Camp Turn-a-bout was undoubtedly tyrannical.) Maybe the very fact that some of the kids rebelled against the totallitarian approach of the camp leaders was not an indicator of their 'naughtiness' or 'waywardness' but was a natural human response. There was no doubt to me that some of these kids were truly out of control and needed help, but was it really benefiting them to teach them to blindly and unquestioninly obey authority figures?

As far as I was concerned, Joe - the punk with the Union Jack T-shirt - might have needed to learn respect for other human beings and the value of contributing to society with some good hard work, but Camp Turn-a-bout also had the potential to strip all those things I saw in him of value. The parts of him that did question the authority systems of his society, and any society who loses the ability or right to questions its governing body, is a society putting itself at risk. It taught them to unquestioningly conform. Surely there must be other ways of getting to these kids.

But I'm jumping the gun a bit, maybe Camp Turn-a-bout will surprise me in future episodes. I see a lot of the psychology surrounding the place works on the basis that the kids need to appreciate their rights by earning them with responsibility. Maybe, hopefully, in further episodes as the kids mature, their understanding of their social responsibilities will be realised as an earned right to question their authority figures, not indiscriminately, but when the time calls for it.

On another note, the whole process of the subjugated human responses to turn on each other, raised some questions in my mind on another matter; how women treat one another.

All of a sudden I recalled reading in my latest book, (Witch Hunters. P.G Maxwell Stuart,) an explanation by the author of what he really understood to be the motivations of the reporting of a witch in a community. By his understanding and research, it was often, (not always,) more a matter driven by local and communal internal pressures rather than driven by larger political conspiracies.

He bases some of this argument on the fact that it was usually women reporting on other women that began the trial of a so-called witch. (There were also many male witches incriminated.)

The state of female relationships in our own day and age is currently under a lot of speculation. Why do our teenage girls tear each other apart? We have movies like “Mean Girls” which addresses the fractious nature of female teenage relationships, we watch psychologists grappling with the problem on Oprah Winfrey. We see in the Big Brother series (I’m speaking of my country’s version,) that the culling of female contestants often happens in preference to the young, virile, Australian male, and we witness the way the girls on the show unwittingly fall into the trap of being prime candidates for viewer’s dislike and their own eventual eviction, because as the boy housemates bond and become closer and more invincible, the female housemates almost always fall into patterns of tearing each other down. And although the males also engage in bitching and back-stabbing, the intensity of the girl’s version of these experiences is strong enough to deny them the same very strong group bond that the males often end up in, which almost always inevitably leads to house domination.

(This is not to say that the average white Australian male always wins Big Brother; We just had a female win recently. But she was young, blonde, sweet and non-threatening, which also reveals the psyche on femininity in the Australian public.)

And while it’s true that there are also a lot of votes going to male housemates simply because the show is puerile and watched by scores of teenage girls who vote the men in so that they can look at their 'hot bods,' and this is probably the obvious reason men are lasting longer than women, it doesn’t discount by above theory as a valid contributor to why men lasting longer on the show than women in general, in fact it supports it, because we then have to ask the question, why are female voters more predisposed to vote for men they like to look at or think they have a crush on as opposed to voting for their own sex in a demonstration of solidarity?

Naturally my first thought was that females tear each other apart without stopping to think about what they’re doing for just the same reasons Rob and I had discussed in relation to Brat Farm. They think they are in a competition with one another to attract male attention. (And as Naomi Wolf points out in The Beauty Myth, females look upon themselves firstly in the light of how other people are going to experience them, and only then how they will experience and look upon themselves.) But it's also deeper than that, they tear each other apart because they're so deeply subjugated by patriarchy that they can't even recognise it, it's normal for them to accept the patriarchal system they've been under forever and so it doesn't enter their minds to truely turn their attention to toppling that power structure, instead they turn in on each other.

http://got.net/~elained/patriarchy.html

Any and every female is preconditioned to exist in a patriarchal society from birth. Julia Kristeva would argue that it begins when a child learns language, which is patriarchal in nature. I would argue that it happens even before that with the unspoken and physical cues that a baby of any sex is presented with and long before he or she understands language.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Kristeva

In one of my Master's papers I wrote;

Long before use of language in a patriarchal form, a child is receiving a multitude of information that signifies our patriarchal culture, which will inevitably affect the very core of who the child becomes. For example; an experiment played out for the camera, was one in which a baby boy was dressed in a pink jumpsuit and left on a couch for strangers to come and talk to and hold, and then alternately dressed in a blue jumpsuit and the same procedure repeated again. Although it was the exact same baby in the pink and then blue jumpsuit, the behaviour of the adults towards the baby was vastly different.

While the baby was in pink, it was held tenderly to people’s bodies, rocked, sung to softly and its future was ruminated on in regards to stereotypical female professions like “ballet dancers.” While the baby was in a blue jumpsuit, people once again assumed it was a little boy, hugged it with a little more gusto, threw it up into the air, told it how “strong” it was and considered such occupations for it as a “football player” or “fireman.” Despite the fact it was always the same baby...

Australian PM takes a tumble

Now, any inquisitive person with a basic interest in politics, or a person with a subversive hatred of their own government, if they saw this;

would be asking them selves, "does every country turn their leader into the number one article on the evening news because he tripped over going up a flight of stairs?"

Well, I think we could assume with reasonable success, that this man would feature on the top news headline of his country for tripping over...

But you could safely guess that this man probably wouldn't...

Never under estimate children's literature, or; Why I love Alice.

The Ancient Greek Presocratic natural philosophers are some of my very favorite thinkers.
(Can't get enough of that abstract metaphysics.)

Heraclitus; (get your mind out of the gutter - it isn't spelt like that,) introduced the notion of flux and unity of opposites just around the time Taoism was born. (Though there is no known proof the ideas were linked by inter-relation of the respective authors.) Amoung other things, Heraclitus believed that harmony existed through the dynamic force of opposites, (night/day, war/peace,) so that the true nature of the universe was one of constant, ever-changing flux and motion.

http://www.wsu.edu/~dee/GREECE/HERAC.HTM

Parmenides; Parmenides on the other hand, believed that change was impossible. To Parmenides, reality is complete as it is. It is unchangeable, immovable, singular and undivided.

http://www.abu.nb.ca/Courses/GrPhil/Parmenides.htm

Zeno; came up with the argument to support Parmenides theory that matter is continous and is composed of an endless collection of units or points. He formulates this idea on the premise that any three dimensional object can be divided endlessly into smaller and smaller parts. This affects time, space and motion. For instance; The famous Achilles and the tortoise paradox;

"Achilles gives the tortoise a head start. But before he can get to where the tortoise is, it will have moved a little farther on, and before he gets to that spot it will have moved further on again and so on indefinitely. Achilles can never catch the tortoise no matter how far he runs, for every time he moves, the tortoise moves too. " (Philosophy. 100 Essential Thinkers. Phillip Stokes. Arcturus. 2003.)

We all know on a practical level that Achilles can out run the tortoise in real life by increasing his own speed in relation to the slower speed of the tortoise, but Zeno's argument to support an unchanging and indivisible whole, has been hard to refute for philosophers down through the ages as any line or distance can be divided up into a smaller one. Atoms as we now understand them, can be divided up into smaller and smaller elements of matter. Apparently modern set-theoretic mathematics now has a satisfactory answer to Zeno's argument, but don't look at me -I"m a mathematics vegetable!!! (Although I did once read The Book of Nothing by John Barrow and not only surprised myself by enjoying it, but even understood most of it.)

http://www.iep.utm.edu/z/zenoelea.htm

The first time I contemplated Parmenides' idea that change was impossible, (in the light of Zeno's argument,) I sat for hours looking up at the leaves rustling in the wind above me and wondered if it were possible that they were moving so infinitely, that they weren't even moving at all. That really blew my mind!

Democritius; made the first prediction of modern science's understanding of atoms. To Democritius, atoms were solid matter and indivisible, and it was only the space around them that could be divided up into infinite parts. This theory lead to unity between Hereclitus and Parmenides' own theories because it encouraged the idea that change and motion were necessary, and simultaneously the idea that non-being was impossible.

http://www.thebigview.com/greeks/democritus.html

The first time I really thought about atoms, I had to go around hitting everything with the palm of my hand or tapping on the surfaces of things with my fingers, saying to people around me, "that's made up of atoms you know ... of course you know, but you know what that means? Well if atoms are really made up of two-thirds empty space as they now say, then all that hard matter around us, doesn't exist the way we think it does. Think about that, we're living in a world that's more space than it is hard matter, it's more not here than it is here.! What does it mean? What does it all mean for mind and spirit then?" Now that really, really blew my mind and it's ideas like that which keep me fascinated in metaphysics, quantum physics and philosophy.

Anyway, I could go on forever about this stuff, but that was a basic introduction to, or reminder of, depending where you are on the subject, the philosophers of Ancient Greece. But why did I put that up?

Because of this;

"Alice could never quite make out, in thinking it over afterwards, how it was that they began: all she remembers is, that they were running hand in hand, and the Queen went so fast that it was all she could do to keep up with her: and the Queen kept crying 'Faster!' but Alice felt she could not go faster, though she had no breath to say so.

The most curious part of the thing was that the trees and other things round them never changed their places at all: however fast they went, they never seemed to pass anything. 'I wonder if all the things move along with us?' thought poor puzzled Alice. And the Queen seemed to guess her thoughts, for she cried 'Faster! Don't try to talk!'

Not that Alice had any idea of doing that. she felt as if she would never be able to talk again, she was getting so out of breath: and the Queen cried 'Faster! Faster!' and dragged her along. 'Are we nearly there?' Alice managed to pant out at last.

'Nearly there!' The Queen repeated. 'Why we passed it ten minutes ago! Faster!' And they ran on for a time in silence,with the wind whistling in Alice's ears, and almost blowing her hair off her head, or so she fancied.

'Now! Now!' Cried the Queen. 'Faster! faster!' And they went so fast that at last they seemed to skim through the air, hardly touching the ground with their feet, till suddenly, just as Alice was getting quite exhausted, they stopped, and she found herself sitting on the ground, breathless and giddy.

The Queen propped her against a tree, and said kindly, 'You may rest a little now.'

Alice looked round her in great surprise. 'Why, I do believe we've been under this tree all the time! Everything's just as it was!'

'Of course it is,' said the Queen: 'what would you have it?'

'Well, in our country,' said Alice, still panting a little, 'you'd generally get to somewhere else - if you ran very fast for a long time, as we've been doing.'

'A slow sort of country!' said the Queen. 'Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that."

And you thought it was just a children's story! (More Alice philosophy coming up in future posts.)

Brat Camp 1 (Reflecting on our brat years.)

Last night we watched Brat Camp on ABC TV. (My favourite character was the kid with the Sid Vicious haircut and the Union Jack T-shirt who hated the Government and Capitalism.)

The premise of the show is that a whole lot of out-of-control English teenage brats are sent packing to an American cowboy hardline ranch in Utah.

Our conversation on the show after we’d watched it went something like this;

I told Rob that I thought it was a little extreme, considering that what was ultimately happening was that naughty little English rebels were being taught how to conform without question and with total subservience to a rigid set of applied rules.

Rob, (being the high school teacher that he is,) said “yeah but these kids need some non-negotiable rules in place because their behaviour is so extreme and that’s all they understand, extreme rules for extreme behaviour. These kids want all the rights without any of the responsibilities and they needed to learn that all rights come with a set of responsibilities.”

I shrugged my shoulders, I guess he was right and I could see how the designers of “Turnaround Ranch” had created a program that supported this theory. In one scene, as a distraught teenage girl was crying out, “this isn’t fair!” The bull-headed cowboy/tyrant teacher/ yelled, spittled, back into her face, (not without a level of vehemence,) “nothing in life is fair, understand that now, nothing in this life is fair for anybody!”

So harsh to hear someone saying it out aloud and to a child more or less, but how can you deny the reality of it?

Our conversation turned to something more like this then;

Me telling Rob that I recall being just like one of those naughty little teenagers who was all caught up in myself and my own worries to the point that I couldn’t acknowledge other people’s sufferings and that I was under the delusion that I had it harder than anyone else I knew - the ‘poor me’ syndrome.

And that it took me a damn long time to wake up and grow up and realise that everyone suffered and everyone’s life was hard in one way or another and life wasn’t fair and no one owed me anything. Once I realised that I wasn’t anyone special and I began to look around and saw how other people all had to cope as best as they could in the face of their own adversities, then I began to think that maybe I should just pull my head in and get on with it.


And sometimes, (I told Rob,) life can get so bloody hard that you really have to purge all that extraneous self-pity because there’s just no time for it. You’re too busy surviving, sometimes one second to the next, especially once you have kids and you have to put your own feelings and emotions and needs on the back shelf, then you realise what hardships are really about, and then you discover that long periods of melancholic self-pity are nothing more than complete and utter narcism. They’re a friggin’ luxury! People who have enough time to feel sorry for themselves for silly lengths of time, are people that aren’t suffering enough to be forced to forego they’re perverted ego massaging.

Rob said, “yeah, took me a long time to grow up and realise that too.”

Maybe we were too sheltered or spoilt, or maybe we didn’t have proper tools to help us deal with the transition from childhood to maturity, to help us deal with, and accept the inevitable tragedies that were set aside to be ours.