The Intervention: Not just racist, but with fascist overtones.
8Our Dispatch today was first published on 12 August 2011.
Buenos dias compañeros,
My mother was a “the glass is half full” person. As she stood doing the dishes, looking out her kitchen window, contemplating her garden, she’d exclaim: Is het niet prachtig, wat zijn we toch gelukkig! (Isn’t it wonderful, aren’t we lucky!).
| http://youtu.be/SzJY96m3lkg |
Douglas Adams said: “Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”
Mum didn’t need the fairies.
My mother also said that Australia was the best country in the world, but that there were some people based in Canberra that were doing their utmost to spoil it.
Fortunately I’ve inherited her joie de vivre. I don’t need fairies either, but I don’t begrudge others their fairies.
Had she lived until I ‘discovered’ Violeta Parra’s most famous song on You Tube, she would have shared my enthusiasm for it.
Gracias a la vida que me ha dado tanto…. (Thanks to Life, that has given me so much…)
A tragic irony that Violeta took her own life.
My father on the other hand was a “the glass is half empty” person. At times he could delegate those ‘Grumpy Old Men’ of the British television series to mere amateur status.
From my dad’s anecdotes:
“ There is much in Australia to get angry about. Peter Reith and Chris Corrigan’s actions on the waterfront some years ago were a particular cause for anger and loathing. At present we have that lying bastard John Howard, that smirking Peter Costello and his mate that sneaky Tony Abbott (more Catholic than the Pope) (OK, yes, anti-Catholicism as well), that evil Phillip Ruddock and last but not least ‘Lippy’ as dad calls him (Alexander Downer). The whole gang being cause for almost apoplectic revulsion.”
“ SEP.’07- Not all that long ago dad was having one of his sessions and kept coming up with his now habitual rather negative opinions. This caused his daughter in law (of whom he is rather fond) to remark that: “Well, you know Mark: every silver lining has its dark cloud”. Touché!”
http://youtu.be/kcDaAr3EPqI shining till the walls come tumbling down….
In 1957 ‘The Black Cloud’, a science fiction novel by astrophysicist Sir Fred Hoyle, was published. A black cloud enveloped earth causing what later became known as a ‘nuclear winter’. All life on earth was threatened, until eventually the black cloud drifted away. Much damage was done but eventually life on earth recovered.
Fifty years later (2007) a black cloud enveloped remote Aboriginal Australia. It became known as ‘The Intervention’
Fred Hoyle’s black cloud was intelligent, the one we are living under isn’t.
I once again quote Martin Flanagan : “To visit Yuendumu is to have the glass tower of your preconceptions shattered into countless brilliant fragments”
To see the brilliant glass fragments, the sun needs to shine on them. The black cloud prevents this from happening.
The sun is gonna shine… someday…
Hasta pronto
Franklin
La yapa: