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This piece was published in the Melbourne Age in December 2001
Ask anyone what is missing in 21st century life this Christmas and the chances are pretty high that the word ‘community’ will be listed somewhere. Sure, they’ll list the detail like time with the kids and wooden toys, but I’ll bet that somewhere in the top 10 will be that romantic notion of a ‘sense of community’.
Whereas the word ‘community’ once meant a township, or place, ‘community’ is now some ‘feeling’ we long for, and if we can only find this ‘feeling’ the empty hole in our psyche will be filled.
So where if anywhere has our sense of community gone? Many believe it went west with the advent of globalisation or the introduction of internet communities. Others lean towards the work v’s community theory; that the more we work, the less time we have for building a nourishing sense of community.
I don’t subscribe to any of those theories. Many young people talk glowingly of their strong communities formed online. Long, hard work has been around for eons. For many traditional cultures, hard work is so enmeshed with family and indeed survival that our current privilege of separating work and home life doesn’t’ exist.
A more likely answer to our waning sense of community stems from our current fixation with it. I’m convinced that as we become more and more obsessed with finding our lost sense of community, we actually lessen our chances of ever finding it.
Several years ago I joined a commune in order to establish a sense of place. The same motive drove the other participants, and for a while all went well in our consciously created, manufactured community.
But ultimately, our ‘boy band’ of middle class social existence began to crumble. We learnt that trying to consciously create a basic building block of human existence without at least some degree of natural cohesion was disastrous. Our attempt at mapping and manipulating the community genome failed. While we could plan our careers, our holidays and our finances, we simply couldn’t plan and create the thing we desired most.
Yet in our totally planned and timetabled lives, it’s hard to believe that there are just some things that can’t be obtained through conscious endeavor. We tend to believe there must be a formula for everything. If we learn about money we’ll be rich. If we work hard at marriage we’ll live happily ever after. If we learn the secrets of happy children our kids will lead trouble free lives. Bollocks!
Some things in life tend to happen with very little conscious effort. Falling in love is one of them, and like finding love, community will probably be found where and when we least expect it.
So how do we suddenly stop the search and gather the faith to rely on a happy accident to fill our community vacuum?
Perhaps the best message is to simply forget about it all together. Wipe the phrase ‘sense of community’ from the vocabulary completely. If we go to church, go to worship God as the only reason. If we buy real estate, buy it because we like the house, not because the agent flogs the ‘community’ angle. Shop, sing more, walk the dog and dig the garden. Eat heartily with friends and family this Christmas. Have a drink or two…just don’t even think about community.
It may be then that this Christmas, we’ll find our lost ‘sense of community’ in the nooks and crannies of our existing ordinary lives; in a space we’ve been all along; in a space we were too busy searching for to find.
This piece first appeared in the Melbourne Age in April 2005
Anzac Day is over for another year, and this year for the first time, we’ve been sobered not by the ritual of what the day represents, but by the spectre of what the day could become.
This year we’ve seen TV footage of the tons of rubbish left on the hillsides…rubbish left by Australian patriots with a hunger for fast food and a reluctance to take their rubbish with them. We’ve seen images of the enormous video screens used to bombard the crowd with hits by the Bee Gees, James Taylor (what has HE got to do with Anzac Day?) and Eric Clapton (likewise!).
Canada’s ‘National Post’ on Tuesday described the Gallipoli crowd as ‘young people who spent much of the weekend drinking and partying at a campout near the site of Australia’s most significant losses of the First World War’. They went on to label the event as a ‘piss-up that rivalled any major concert weekend.’ Isn’t it great to see a leading overseas newspaper describe the event in such glowing terms?
Closer to home the supermarket shelves have been chockers with a dazzling variety of Anzac biscuits. No doubt Woolies and Coles did very nicely out of that thank you. We have Anzac footy games, Anzac flags and a burgeoning Anzac paraphernalia market that will soon rival that of Valentines Day. The Australian Ebay site is currently offering ‘Huge deals on Anzac products” Why, there’s even ‘Anzac Day flag style umbrellas with free post for $19.99’. Bargain!
Our television channels dedicated umpteen hours of highly paid commercial airtime to Anzac Day. The fact that the time delay meant we could actually watch the Dawn Service without getting up at dawn was a marketer’s delight. TV advertising types will be examining the ratings figures closely to tweak next year’s broadcast. Perhaps the March could be cut just a bit shorter so we could get a panel discussion thingy in prior to the actual service. Perhaps there could be an Anzac Eve Service as well and maybe a sponsored pre-dawn sound and light show could stretch the coverage a little.
I even heard people wishing one another a ‘happy Anzac Day’. Why then can’t we have Anzac Day cards that we give to friends and loved ones? Brilliant!
The new battle of Gallipoli lies not with some road going too deeply into a hillside or a car park being built too close to a battlefield. The new battle lies in the probable commercialisation of a significant date that needs no hype and no spectacle to pull the heartstrings of those who care. The new soldiers will be those like RSL Victoria Chief Executive John Deighton who was disgusted at the “lack of respect” shown by attendees at the Gallipoli service. They will be fighting not only the media types who see live coverage of the event as an enormously profitable advertsing vehicle, but the myriad of event organisers, promotion marketers and entrepeneurs who see the world as simply a marketplace.
No matter how badly it may sit with business, the world is more than just a shop. It is a children’s playground, a concert stage, a hospital, a game of hopscotch, a school and a garden. It is many things that don’t necessarily revolve around consumerism, advertising and hype. Anzac Day is also one of these things. A day when simplicity and silence can paint a far more memorable picture than any Bee Gees film clip or televised spectacle.
This whole concept is anathema to marketers around the world, yet lets hope that somehow, common sense can prevail and Anzac Day will be spared from the galloping maddness of contemporary consumerism.
This piece first appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald in August 2005
In 2000, Bilal and Mohammed Skaf were sentenced to a total of 79 years jail for their part in a horrifying series of gang rapes in Sydney’s western suburbs. Even with their collective 79 years imprisonment, the youngest of the Skaf brothers could be released as early as 2013….eight years from now. The victims, who undoubtly know their rapists’ possible release dates all too well, will be around 29 years old. I wonder how they’ll feel as 2013 ticks over?
In our search for a just and appropriate punishment for such crimes, we’ve opted to take the easy option once again. Our penal system, a system where ‘like meets like’, creates an uneasy sense of security in that it’s a system that many sex offenders ultimately leave in order to rejoin the community. It’s a system where ‘rehabilitation’ revolves around psychological counselling and where repeat offence is nothing unusual.
Its time therefore to look at a different punishment and rehabilitation formula; one that will create a sense of security for the victims, a sense of security for a community obviously alert to the horror of sex crimes, and one that in many ways creates a more tolerable after-prison experience for the perpetrators.
Castration is currently the sex-crime punishment in several US states and is used as a treatment for repeat sex offenders in many European countries. The actual form of castration varies from chemical castration, where the perpetrator needs monthly injections, to surgical castration which involves removal of the testicles. Whatever the form, castration is a proven method of reducing not only the offender’s sexual urges, but the aggressive traits that produce the violent sex crimes we’ve seen over the past five years.
A recent German study compared 100 surgically castrated sex offenders and 35 non-castrated sex offenders ten years after their release back into the community. The repeat sex-crime rate of castrated offenders was 3%, while the repeat rate for non-castrated offenders was an astonishing 46%. Other studies from Demark and Czechoslovakia reveal similar results, with the Danish study revealing that the few repeat sex-crimes by castrated offenders were all non-aggressive and non-violent.
In Alabama, legislation is currently being debated where perpetrators of certain sex crimes are chemically castrated for a period of 10 years after their release from prison, and are required to wear electronic anklets for the remainder of their lives. While the actual legislation is likely to be tempered, Alabama won’t stand alone in introducing chemical castration. There is even a call that chemical castration doesn’t go far enough, and that mandatory surgical castration is the most appropriate penalty for violent sex crimes. In light of the violent gang rapes experienced in NSW, many in Australia would agree.
There will no doubt be a cry from civil libertarians that castration in any form is barbaric and not a punishment suited to a civilized and democratic society like Australia. I would urge these individuals to also consider if the degree of child sexual abuse is a hallmark of our civilized society? If the number of rapes, only of fraction of which are reported, is also an indication of our advanced system of being? 11,000 people contacted NSW Police in the year to June 2004 to report a sexual assault. This included 63 gang rapes and 320 child sexual assaults. Our ‘civilized’ punishment and rehabilitation approach is clearly working.
A true civilized society sees the sociopathic behaviour of the child sexual abuser or rapist as a condition that must be dealt with on both psychological and physiological levels. Our current fixation with prison-based psychological rehabilitation programs is not only costly, but clearly not providing either the victims, or the community with any sense of continued security. Strangely enough, the current system also provides no security for those offenders who claim to be at the mercy of urges that are virtually impossible to control. In the USA, it isn’t uncommon for sex offenders to undergo voluntary castration, knowing that a life out of prison is far preferable to a life inside.
It’s also true that a civilized society must look at what is best for the victims of these crimes ahead of what is best for the perpetrators. A sense of security for the victims above all else is what we should be aiming for. Knowing that the perpetrator is unlikely to commit the same sort of crime on release, and be largely incapable of doing so, would give some degree of security to those who have surely suffered enough.
As we hear this week of yet another series of violent rapes, committed it seems by one perpetrator, we must look at a punishment that fits the crime. If the outcry surrounding Otto Darcy-Searle is any indication, it’s a debate Australia is ready for.
This article first appeared in ‘My Child’ magazine in 2006
New parents tend to be a fairly blinkered lot. For most of us, our world is so firmly fixed on our beautiful new addition that the outside world doesn’t exist. This outside world strangely enough, is a place where life marches on without talk of nappies, breastfeeding or wind. It contains people who incomprehensibly don’t see our child as the very center of their universe. Good heavens!
Now don’t get me wrong. There’s a very solid reason why new parents are so single-mindedly child-absorbed. Biologically, new parents are programmed to do their best to guarantee the survival of their child and thus the continuation of their genetic stuff. I know it sounds harsh but it’s true. It’s the same with all animals, yet unlike the mongoose or the funnel web, out young are fairly hopeless in the fighting, hunting and gathering departments for several years. They rely on us to ensure they at least get to the hunting and gathering stage in one piece. I suppose we call it love. I don’t know what mongooses call it.
Now in this stable, wealthy country of ours, this should be an easy task. We don’t have the threat of sabre-toothed tigers, malaria or rat plague to worry about. NSW isn’t in a civil war with Queensland and unlike certain types of monkey we don’t need to guard against cannibal raids from the neighboring troop. So what do we worry about? What do we need to protect out children from so we can put our natural biological urges to good use? There’s gotta be something!
On asking a couple of new mums this question up at my local café, one came up with a frightening response. It was definitely a threat that no other generation of kids would have been exposed to and I’m not talking bird flu or reality TV here. She reckoned that the main concern with many new parents was that dreaded ‘I’ word…Imperfection. Most parents wanted their child to be not only safe from any form of harm, but they’d do just about anything to maximise their child’s chance of winning in the perfection stakes. From pre-school education to fashion to creative play, today’s toddlers have the expectation that ‘middle of the pack’ just isn’t good enough. If little Amy isn’t interested in reading at three there’s a problem. Ug!
Now this made me think. My grandmother was the second in a family of six kids. My grandfather was the fifth of five. If, as the statistics show, parents these days are having less children than their ancestors, then the biological pressure to ensure the survival of our smaller families is far more intense. Indeed, if we choose to only have one child, then we’d better make pretty damn sure that child is 100% cocooned until they reach the hunting and gathering stage and can fend for themselves. Not only that, we’d better guarantee they are 100% equipped to deal with whatever nasty forces he or she confronts in adulthood or our genetic line is well and truly stuffed!
Perhaps the one way to make sure our smaller ‘flock’ survives is to make them perfect, or at least as perfect as they can be. This would pretty much comply with Darwin’s ‘Survival of the fittest’ theory. If our child looks better than others, is healthier than others, more intelligent than others, wiser than most, consistent in action and in all ways the brightest star in our local sky, then according to the theory, he or she should survive hands down. A no-brainer really.
Wrong! We here in parent-land have forgotten that in trying to make any creature more perfect, we actually put them at greater risk. Think about it for a sec. If as human animals we cocoon our young in blankets of safety and perfection, don’t we in some ways maximise the chance that when a negative force does hit, it will hit a damn sight harder than it would if our young been just that little bit rough around the edges?
Molecular biology tells us that if a cell is exposed to and survives threats in the form of viruses, bacteria and harsh conditions, that cell will be more robust in enduring future similar attacks. Many pediatricians are now urging parents to let their child eat the occasional bit of slime off the floor or be exposed to the cold more often; that doing so makes the child’s immune system robust and able to fend off other nasties when they attack.
My daughter ate a snail once. The frothy stuff coming from the side of her mouth didn’t seem to worry her but it sure as hell worried me. I then discovered seven of the buggers in her pocket ready to be snacked on when the mood took her. While I didn’t endorse her choice of snack food, I often wonder whether her time running around naked on the farm in Kangaroo Valley, getting filthy, kissing sheep, swimming in damns and having to dig holes in the ground because we didn’t have a toilet, has helped her be one of the healthiest and more robust kids around. Even when Rambo, our demented black sheep butted her painfully on the bum, she learnt a pretty useful life lesson. Not everyone or everything is nice…all of the time. Like Rambo, we’re all imperfect creatures, and imperfection is simply a facet of life we adjust to and even embrace, not avoid.
So perhaps we have found our equivalent of the sabre-tooth tiger after all. Maybe, just maybe, we can put our protective urges to good use by safeguarding our children from the insidious 21st century disease of suffocating safety, impossible perfection and Everest-like expectation. Maybe by doing that for our kids, we’ll also protect ourselves from the same disease. Now there’s a thought.
Last week I took a visit to the shopping mall for my yearly purchase of business shirts at the ‘stock take sales.’ While I doubt the true value of the ‘bargains’ I came home with, I felt that after the experience I needed some counselling…as if I’d suffered some emotional assault at the hands of the mall.
There were hundreds of people grabbing at clothing items they normally wouldn’t have glanced twice at. These ‘sale’ shoppers, in their search for the perfect ‘bargain’, were more like hyenas to a carcass than savvy consumers. It was hunting and gathering at its worst, and I was a part of it.
No doubt overly sensitised by my shirt experience, I was then struck by the thousands of signs demanding that I ‘Look’, ‘Buy’, ‘Try’ or ‘Eat’. Demanding signs and audio messages were everywhere, and this assault, coupled with the hyena frenzy could easily make the faint hearted spiral into fit of unconscious spending. I decided to go to the gym instead.
After struggling with a few barbells, and feeling depressed by the 18 year-old Adonis nearby lifting double the weight I was, I took to my weekly stumble on the treadmill. Yet even in my sacred treadmill space, the assault continued. The main reason was that the ‘cardio theatre’ at my gym has 16 screens all showing a different program. Programs ranging from Oprah to Dr Phil to Judge Judy all show at once. My brain can’t cope with one American talk show, let alone 16. I’m not epileptic, but I felt a seizure coming on.
The final punch came when ‘MC Funky-Dog was interrupted for a ‘Boot Camp’ advertisement. Lots of young people were running on the sand and being ordered about by someone in army fatigues. It was clearly the modern thing to do. The ad told me to ‘Enrol now and save’ and asked me to ‘Reach for the sky’ and ‘Try my hardest.’ I thought I was.
I felt another fit coming on, and to avoid it I calculated that if there were 15 ads an hour on each screen, I had been exposed to 127 advertising messages during my 30-minute treadmill stumble. No wonder I feel bad when I leave the gym.
Now I might be getting old and grumpy, but surely it’s time for us all to minimise the sensory assault we tolerate in our daily lives. If the mall assaults us, we could decide to shop in a less bothersome environment. If the gym assaults us with video blah, we could change gyms or jog in the park. If the clock radio wakes us with advertising messages, we could simply choose to wake up to a non-commercial station. We’ve just got to take a deep breath, realise we do have the power to change our world, and act.
