Well, well, well.  I just found this in my Drafts folder – been there since 2016.  Looks like it didn’t get published.  Dunno why.  If I say so myself it was a cracking post.  So here it is.  Volume 1 of the Lost Posts.  (Well, the only one really, but it sounded good…)

Dateline – Australia.  We are currently sitting on the edge of our seats to see if a fundamentally decent person who is our Prime Minister will roll over at the baying of his far right party members as they bluster about complaining about a programme in schools.  “Oh my God, there is a highly successful anti-bullying school programme that is targeted towards tolerance of gay and lesbian and transgender type people and for the sake of almighty Jesus we do not want our children to embrace, let alone be tolerant of, these people.  They may convert into them.  Hellfire and damnation be upon thee!”

My response?  Shut the fuck up.

I do remember a kid at my school in the 1970’s that was thought to be gay.  Man did he cop some shit.  Teased.  Mocked.  Hassled.  I didn’t get involved in it, but then again I didn’t actively step in and completely stop it either, so there is a degree of complicitness (if that word exists) there.  I did tell a couple of my friends to leave him alone.  I wasn’t this kid’s friend as such but I kinda knew a bit of what he was copping.  I was a sickly child and was very fragile emotionally.  A sook, a cry baby, a whiner, a baby.  They were some of the tags I copped for a while.  But when I flogged the living shit out of one guy who pushed me too far one day I got a lot of less of that.  I could defend myself when pushed and did get a bit of a rep as being occasionally volcanic.  Best left alone in that case.  I’m sure the shitheads who gave me grief found another unwilling target.  Well, wouldn’t it be good if all kids had the intellectual toolkit to know how to react when you run across someone who is a bit different to you?  To not be afraid of them.  To not mock them.  That those people can make a valuable contribution.  Can be your friend.  Can be your teammate.  Can help you with your homework, assignments or just learn another way to look at life.  I’ve had gay friends.  They are just people.  A little different maybe.  But they don’t try and hurt me.  They don’t try and change me.  I accept them as they are and they accept me, with all my weirdness and personal oddities, as I am.

Well, if kids are armed with the knowledge from this programme that has been delivered at some schools for quite some time now, then maybe they will grow into more tolerant adults.  With greater proclivity for developing friendships and alliances with people they haven’t known since pre-school.  Will perhaps even be comfortable around people of other cultures, faiths, skin colours.  Maybe even accept other members of their own species as their brothers and sisters.  Like they really are.

Intermission: one day I was waiting for my wife in the local credit union and my daughter was with me.  She was about 2 or 3.  There was a small kids play area with some blocks there.  An Aboriginal man walked in with his partner and young son.  His partner queued up to do her banking and his son went into the same play area with my daughter.  Now I doubt my daughter had ever clapped eyes on a child of such dark skin colour before.  Didn’t bother her at all.  She turned around when she heard the little gate open behind her to see the little boy there.  He hesitated so she handed him some blocks.  They cooperated and built a tower and took it in turns to belt it down with their arms before building it again.  And when it was time to go the little boy gave her a hug and we left.  His father smiled at me when my daughter handed his son the blocks and I said to him when we were leaving “I reckon we could all learn a bit from these two”.  He agreed.  We shook hands and I left.  Moral of story: Kids know this stuff already.  They have no discrimination.  No fears.  We teach them that crap.  We are responsible.  We should fix it.

Now, the title of this post is the right are wrong.  And they are.

It is October now.

Daylight savings have just kicked in, and we’ve just enjoyed a few nice sunny days where the temperature hasn’t gone any higher than 28 degrees Centigrade. All very pleasant.

I even went back to the Office for a day to help a colleague return after a substantial time off. Hardly anyone around which was nice. But since COVID’s tentacles are lessening in NSW next week my team all resume working, partially at work and partially at home. We’ve been working out of home for the last 6 months. And for the most part is has worked out well.

For me it’s been a case of waking up, putting on enough clothes not to freeze to death in my outside office, visit the heads, take medication, walk less than 15 meters and then just get stuck in. A 45km each way commute kind of slows that whole process down a bit. Ah well. It was fun while it lasted. It kinda was. The only impact COVID had on my family and I was we bought masks, I worked from home (and got far more done than ever before) and two events we were booked to attend didn’t run. A massive metalheads concert in Sydney my son was really looking forward to and a writing workshop my wife was going to attend in Mildura. Oh yeah, bog paper was harder to buy than usual and I had to go to three different supermarkets to buy the milk I usually buy for us for a week. I am not driving 90km a day to do daily shopping and since I could only buy two bottles of milk I had to get two at Woolies, two at Aldi and one at Coles to get our usual supply. And delayed haircuts too. That’s it. Basically bugger all impact on us at all. Absolutely nothing to complain about at all.

Lockdowns? No difference, we don’t get out much anyway. Working for a Government department doing a job I could do from anywhere that had a power point and internet made it pretty easy to keep working. My little town, village really, doesn’t have restaurants and cafes. We have a cafe now though. Does a roaring trade too somehow. But our Pub burned down years ago and won’t be getting replaced. How unAustralian is that!

But the question on many minds is will COVID be back? And the answer is “of course it will you damned idiot and what did they teach you at school anyway?” Australia like many countries relies on tourism. And a lot of our tourism comes from outside Australia. And when the tourists return in large numbers so will our little buddy COVID. “By then we’ll have a vaccine” exclaim many people. Don’t you just love their faith in science that will blindly hope for a vaccine but when a scientist talks to them about real stuff like climate change they turn their back and ignore them. People really are shits. Prepare for the New Normal. No hang on, people were shits before, let me make that clear. Also the New Normal is a great album, gotta plug it somehow, love your work lads. Things like COVID are here to stay – get used to it people. Adapt. Or not.

So today is the day after the Federal Government have released the new Budget. If you have read any of my previous musings you’ll see I love taking the piss out of a Budget. Not this time. I don’t need to. It is self sufficient in that regard. With our gas led recovery and our cutting back of relief for the unemployed this Budget needs no assistance to be tragic. It’s not funny. It is rather pathetic. It’s to be expected of conservative government though and for some reason my fellow Australians keep voting those governments in against their own interests. I don’t get it. I’m sure I never will. At a time when millions of people globally have COVID, when hundreds of thousands have died from COVID and when an absolute shitload of people have been unluckier than I and have lost their jobs due to the impacts of COVID wouldn’t this be an ideal time to change the dynamic? To make people the centre of the political argument? To invest in people instead of big business? To wean us off coal fired electricity and have more local power generation using renewable technologies? To use what we have learned about remote working and remote services. To fund their improvement, to make them part of the New Normal. To give people a bit of dignity through a minimum living wage? To invest in the lower paid if you want to boost the economy since those people traditionally save less? I’m not an economist. And can I add thank fuck for that – no offence meant to Greg Jericho – probably the only economist I’ve ever seen I didn’t want to yell at. But even I can see how these things would change our paradigm. And to those thinking how do I fund this – jesus, just give me the books, I’ll find it inside a day out of the waste, the subsidies to those who don’t need it, the handouts to Murdoch press, etc. No problem there buddy.

2020 will be remembered as the Year of the Pandemic. Nothing I can do about that. It would have been nice if it could also have been remembered as the Year Things Started to Change. The Year We Acted From Our Consciences. The Year That Black Lives Matter Actually Mattered. I don’t see it. I don’t see that change coming. I don’t even see the mood for change around. So many want it to ‘go back to normal’. Do they even see what normal was? Do they see how they can improve on the old normal? They (the royal ‘they’ meaning the general population) don’t. And that saddens me greatly. This is a generational opportunity. And I believe we are wasting it. Instead we get Brexit, Trump, Bolsanaro, Putin, China vs USA tantrum throwing contests, ongoing climate change, serious delineation of the population based on how they vote (Dem vs Rep, Labor vs Tories, Liberal/National vs Labor, etc) and a fracturing of any type of civil conversation on frankly any and every topic. The economy is now more important than the population that create it. Well, fuck normal. Normal sucks. It’s time for a new idea. For politicians to represent their constituents. And it’s time for those constituents to be informed enough to know when they are being fed bullshit. Instead of being happy to get patted on the head and a $5 tax cut. I’m old and I’m tired and I see the deadshits in my age bracket hanging onto every scrap of power they can, milking every last benefit they can for them and their mates. And making sure whatever is left is an absolute shitstorm so whoever gets the power from them eventually gets the blame for everything after they are gone. It sickens me. When do we wake up and see it? I don’t think we do. I think it’s hear to stay.

And it all became utterly blindingly obvious in 2020, the Year of well, um, Shit.