The Waiting Man

Where do we stand on the separation of Church & State? Personally I firmly believe that religion has no place in politics. Public policy should not be written with anyone's god as some kind of co-author

So what about countries where the 2 seem inseparable, like Iran - where the nation's top cleric wields even more power & influence than its President, the USA - where, increasingly, policy is being drafted straight out of the Old Testament. Or... deep breath... Israel - where being Jewish is so tied up in the nation's recent & ancient history, that it seems impossible to disagree with anything they do without automatically being labelled anti-semitic

Personally, I subscribe to no religion & have major doubts about the existence of any kind of supreme deity. But the rest of you are free & welcome to practise whatever doctrine takes your fancy, as long as it doesn't encroach on my way of life. Which is obviously why I firmly believe in absolute separation of Church & State. If your religion says you shouldn't do something, then don't do it. But you have no right to stop me... whether I'm eating bacon, taking some lord's name in vain, supporting a woman's right to abortion or LGBTQI+ people's human rights, or being repulsed by the practice of female genital mutilation on religious grounds &/or marrying off pre-pubescent girls to (much) older men. And I'm 110% opposed to killing people just because their imaginary deity is different to yours

I don't really want to wade into the murky history of Israel, its dissolution in the early CE centuries & scattering of its people, its subsequent occupation by various Islamic & Christian states for over 1500 years... you can Google all that & read at your leisure. Suffice to say that the creation of modern Israel in 1948 was not very well planned, or implemented & it displaced countless people whose roots in that land went back many generations & hundreds of years. But because they were Muslims, none of the Western governments gave a sh!t. Right from its start, modern Israel has had to fight to exist, against various Islamic countries who at the very least wanted the land back & at worst, wanted to eradicate its people because... well, because they're Jews & Allah apparently doesn't like them & that's good enough reason. At least, that's what the cleric/mullah/ayatollah etc... said

It hasn't even been 80 years since then, but it's been an unholy mess for most of that time. We've had ceasefires, various peace treaties & accords... but sooner or later religion rears its head & it all kicks off again, with Iran threatening to wipe Israel off the map & the world superpowers posturing & positioning according to their interest

And here's the contentious bit - there have been some Israeli leaders who seem to take delight in poking the bear. Heavy -handed annexations of territories they want to 'reclaim' like the West Bank, Southern Lebanon, Golan Heights... & Gaza, have inevitably led to clashes with Islamic forces & if it was a European nation doing that... well, we had 2 world wars over that kind of behaviour, plus a couple of serious ones in Asia... yet somehow, Israel is held to a different standard, even when it has cast the first stone. Somehow, it makes me think we're in the middle of the latest Crusade, where the Christian forces are still trying to take back the Holy Land from the Infidel, so they arm the Israeli army to its teeth while simultaneously decrying its unsurprising use of those weapons

Don't get me wrong - what Hamas did recently was horrific & unforgiveable, but at the same time, Israel had been poking that bear for a while - it was going to lash out eventually. And now, Hezbollah is getting fractious about Israeli rocket attacks on the Israel/Lebanon border. It appears Israeli PM Netanyahu is hell-bent on starting a new war, whatever the cost is to his own citizens, let alone anyone else. As if the cost isn't way too high already, with Jewish people in countries far from Israel being threatened & targeted by Muslims whose parents fled the Middle East to get the hell away from all that fighting a generation ago

In summary. I'm not anti-Semitic, I'm not pro-Muslim... I'm just not a fan of using religion as a coverall for aggressive nationalism

Before life so suddenly & tragically interrupted my... well, life, really... I'd been thinking about a lot of the things people have been saying & writing in the aftermath of our Federal Election, desperate to find some global trend to hang it on. Somehow, people seem to think that just because our conservative Liberal party won against what opinion polls indicated were insurmountable odds, a lot of people & especially pundits are really trying to tie it into Trump, Brexit, & the rise of the far-right. Even though the far-right candidates for both upper & lower Houses didn't fair particularly well anywhere, even in Queensland (famously described as our Alabama, by a past politician) - much to a lot of people's audible relief

Thinking about all of that, especially given our kind of sad longing to be part of a global movement, or epidemic (Again!!! Every half-baked loony with a gun here is quickly & erroneously linked to Islamic terrorism, as if we really want to be able to say "Look! See!! Us too!!!"), made my thoughts turn to where it's gone wrong, not just for Australia, but for the world in general. Okay... mostly the Western world, but that's the one I live in & feel qualified to comment on... Because I think the rise of globalism, mostly via ever more impressive technology designed to 'bring us together', is actually splitting us apart

To try & put it on a postcard - the more people of lesser opportunity, education & status see of the rest of the world, the less they like it. They're having a hard enough time hanging on to what they see as theirs, without the threat of the rich, over-educated, or overseas masses taking it away from them, let alone the horrible realisation that there aren't just a bunch of people in your own country getting better jobs than you, but they're everywhere!!!. And what if they come for your job & your path of opportunity, broken & torturous as it may be - it's still yours!! Even if you never actually get around to walking it... be damned if anyone else is going to. And possibly, the more you're fed images of fabulous no-talent nobodies having a fabulous time, the more you want that lifestyle & the angrier you get when it remains unachievable. Rightly or wrongly, the divide between rich & poor is not only growing, but it's being pushed in your face very time you look at your phone, or your 'smart' TV, or your computer - which you're struggling to keep up the payment plans on

Here in Australia, the far-right One Nation party can't seem to decide if Asian &/or Muslim immigrants/refugees are here to take your job, or take all the Government Welfare. It doesn't seem to matter that, surely, they can't do both... either message gets through to people who see themselves as having been left behind by the march of global technology & economy & are easily preached to, swayed, then mobilised to vote for racists with no solution, plan, suggestion, or agenda - other than a white one that involves saying 'No' to anything that threatens to advance Australia beyond the good old post-WWII days that nobody can really remember, but seem to represent some kind of (white) golden era...

... where women were encouraged to leave school at 16 to become a secretary, marry a middle-manager, quit the job & start breeding, Aboriginal people were not recognised as 'people', domestic violence wasn't frowned upon, or even much talked about, polio, rubella, smallpox, tuberculosis & skin cancer all did their part in keeping the population down & asbestos was the fibre of the future... Oh boy, it certainly was!

To put it on a postage stamp (remember those??), xenophobia, chronophobia, prosophobia & technophobia are the new fuel for the fires of the 21st century. Easily started & fanned large enough to start burning books in... or phones, computers, non-Christians, or eventually, just anyone who looks at you 'funny'

A bit of a grab-bag entry... bits & pieces of the last little while. Written at work, as my PC is having an extended stay at its doctor's, trying to cure a bout of blue-screens-of-death

First & foremost - the spark for this entry, is this heartfelt & pretty darned accurate op-ed from Craig Foster, a former 'Socceroo' - that's Australian National Football player to the rest of the world... He was recently very involved in the case of a Bahraini refugee who had been granted asylum in Australia, got married & went to have his honeymoon in Thailand, where he was promptly detained by Thai authorities acting on a tip-off from 'someone' & under pressure from the Bahrain 'government' (for want of a better word, like 'monarchy', 'dictatorship', or 'despotic regime'... okay, that's 2 words), thrown in jail & kept there for a few months while extradition proceedings were started, debated, contested, decried & ultimately dropped - mostly because of international pressure from other countries, including Australia, as well as the F.I.F.A. & high-profile sport ambassadors... All brought to bear at the pointy end by Mr Foster & his tireless support for the poor guy

Now that Hakeem is safely back in his adopted country, Craig has written this piece, calling on Australia to up its game when it comes to refugees & basic human rights - an area where both sides of our politics seem to be out of touch with the opinions & desires of the majority of the population. I say majority, because there is an extremely vocal & somehow influential right-wing minority who would rather peddle fear, xenophobia & racism, than allow multicultural integration to run its usually quite peaceful course - like it did when war-damaged Europeans came here in the 40s & 50s, like it did when the Vietnamese came here in the 70s. Like it should, now that more war-torn refugees are looking to get the hell out of what's left of their home & homeland. We gladly accepted German & Japanese migrants after WWII, so why not a bunch of innocent, displaced & largely persecuted Muslims?

The 'M' word seems to be the sticking point here... May I point out that, according to history, the Crusades were hundreds of years ago & weren't started by Muslims. It seems depressingly fitting that the 2 most recent 'Crusades' didn't go too well for the Christian soldiers either. It would appear that, if you want to be a World Leader, you need to have either not taken, or simply skipped, history lessons at school & university

On a different note... it's the little things that make me happy. Like 2 days of cloud & drizzling rain... getting a discount on my morning coffee... L-SP & I will be going on a technology-free holiday in about 2 weeks... & the Calvin Klein store I walk past every day has finally replaced the large photos of the Kardashian clan with generic models for its new advertising. Good riddance to the whole KKKKKKing lot of them

Sorry for the radio silence over the last few months... I've fallen out of love with talking about myself & my life in general


However, I'll never get tired of talking about things like this... the relics of a bygone era who continue to poison the education & opinions of the modern world

For the-god-of-your-choice's sake... or for no god's sake at all if you prefer, I wish some people would either grow up or shut up. No other options are available

That goes for you too:~ Fred Nile, Alan Jones, Ray Hadley, John Laws, the entire 'Family First' political party, Clive Palmer, the entire US Republican party, Rupert Murdoch, Cardinal George Pell... you can take over from here, I'm sure