My world on the web
When we get fit and put on good clothes, even sexy clothes, we’re hoping our girlfriends greet us with shrieks of delight at our well-toned arms and how well our jeans fit. Martha may have been on the cover of a men’s magazine, but almost all the discussion since her appearance has been by women.
What confused me was all this deeply felt concern for children, when I really hadn’t seen much anxiety similarly expressed for all the thousands of Australian kids who live in dangerous, damaging, high-risk circumstances and whose lives are being compromised and even cut short, all with our full understanding of their problems.
I guess I might take all the outrage a bit more seriously if I heard wails of anguish about the more than 15,000 children in Lyle Shelton’s state who need foster homes and can’t live safely with parents who I assume are mostly still the gender they were assigned at birth; the criticism would be easier to take if it came from people who daily expressed horror at the 1.3 million Australian children who went without enough food every day, or the more than 50,000 kids who don’t get to go to school.
State and territory child protection services responded to more than 178,800 children in 2020–21 — an increase from about 168,300 in previous years — and the issues ranged from child abuse or neglect through to care and protection orders, or placement in out-of-home care.
Cartoon descriptions? How else to describe a cartoon world?
The celebrities own the presses now, we in the media just get the notifications.
My love for our friendship has not died. But I do not know how to talk to my friend. Like the miners’ wives, I’ll wait. I hope I don’t have to dig us out.
As far as I can tell, no jurisdiction has yet put proper thought and effort into ventilation, air filtration, and priority teacher vaccination at our schools not only to mitigate against future outbreaks but to find a way to keep schools open safely during lockdown and protect our children’s mental health and educational future.
There was important, challenging but not impossible engineering and construction work to be done to make schools safer for students, teachers and the families they go home to, but we haven’t done it. And we still refuse to see it as a high priority.
As the boom is lowered on yet another lockdown, how are we still having the same conversations? Fully 15 months on, how are so many issues unchanged, uncorrected and wildly off-track, Virginia Trioli writes.
We are witnessing one of the most important battles of our times: not just the electoral one, but the battle between the power and importance of our institutions and of facts, and the self-interested misrepresentation of the truth.
The skirmishes are without precedent. Television networks actually took down and cut the feed of a US President as he gave a speech of countless untruths. Twitter now routinely deletes his tweets. Social media platforms suspend the accounts of his high-profile surrogates.
This is a moment of reckoning, the first time that a civil society has genuinely asserted itself over the jungle of social media and the ecosystem in which Trump has thrived and that he has so effectively used.
It’s a bit of a paradox, because at the same time we have banded together strongly like never before. We wait to see whether what happens next, our recovery and the help we get along the way, will bind some of the wounds as well.
hopelessness and endurance from Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”
The suffering of so many in this lockdown is real and not to be easily dismissed. So many days home again with small children or with out of work partners or with no-one at all, and the feeling is overpowering: I can’t go on. But then — I’ll go on.
We try to eat well, and exercise and meditate and do all the right things, but as the infection numbers stubbornly bump the ceiling of triple figures, sometimes — well, we just need a piece of cake. And a cuddle, if we can. And a bit of joy.
I am these days a rather godless type — but thank you has become my daily prayer.
I’ve mentioned before that the loss of performed music is probably my greatest sorrow through all this, and I was wondering: what music was everyone else turning on, to find some solace, joy, escape, refuge?
The late essayist and quicksilver intellectual Christopher Hitchens once argued that “above all, we are in need of a renewed Enlightenment … and this Enlightenment will not need to depend, like its predecessors, on the heroic breakthroughs of a few gifted and exceptionally courageous people. It is within the compass of the average person”.
For many, the universality of the humanities degree is the most democratic expression of this ambition.
People with autism don’t often get that much understanding. It takes so much effort, concentration, emotional strength and focus just to get by in the neurotypical world that an autistic person can often start their day already in the kind of deficit the rest of us experience at the end of it. The world can be overwhelming. And dispiriting.
If on those few, terrifying days we can come together as a community in full understanding of what Will’s needs would be, might we not be able to do that for other autistics in our life on any given day? A little more patience, a little more consideration, flexibility and accommodation that means they don’t have to be lost before they can be found?
If you want your heartfelt celebration of Will’s discovery to have meaning and effect beyond this week, cross the road to ask if families with kids on the spectrum are doing OK, or if they are lonely or if they need some help. If you work with an autistic person, shift your perspective so as to make a little more room for theirs. If you don’t understand, ask.
“Not everyone can afford to go out to eat. I now have to manage my kids’ disappointment when they want take away or to eat out and we can’t afford it.
Declining offers to go out to eat by making excuses because I’m embarrassed. I enjoyed ISO. It made me feel ok about not having money to spend.”
Sarah aside – and you go, girlfriend – what have you learnt?
That you’re a little more prone to anxiety than you thought you were? That being an extrovert doesn’t shield you from loneliness? That being an introvert doesn’t shield you from loneliness?
Although I’ve got enough done, I haven’t felt so productive this week. I think that’s because I’ve had to slow my brain down to stop it racing ahead and thinking of possible futures in which everything I’m currently doing fades into insignificance.
I’m taking a lot of solace in long walks with my family, in nursing a single malt and talking to my wife, and in hanging out with my parents on video chat. I even, with the help of our children, painted the garden fence this morning!
I really like your point about turning to comedy or tragedy:
The rationale behind this is that, I think that in times of crisis it’s better to go for either end of the spectrum. Either comedy and light-hearted stuff to raise my spirits, or tragedy and dark content to make me realise that things aren’t really so bad after all.
I have been left thinking about some of the stories that Cory Doctorow has been sharing. Trying to find some hope in the tragedy.
This is how Virginia Trioli tried to make sense of things in her newsletter:
But every now and again the mists are clearing. When the household settles into a rhythm of energetic morning work and then quiet family reading; when the daily cycle around the park becomes the highlight of the day.
Not sure what the Stoicism says about hope.
We are entering a kind of wartime through which we will eventually establish a kind of normal, a way of getting through life while the bombs fall and we head into the bunkers, we now endure the infective pandemic version of that.
I hope that in adversity, if we come together for the common good, this home front might just be the making of us.
As I stood facing the sea that New Year’s Eve morning, as far east as the Rural Fire Service alert that awakened me at 5am urged me to go, I wondered why I wrote those words, but could not follow the warning.
We were hosing down a house that did not belong to us and preparing to take the kids into the sea if the fire that roared through Cobargo and now blazed towards the beautiful little town of Bermagui on the south coast of NSW came closer. It was 10am, and daylight was a faint line of lost hope on the horizon. Summer ended that morning even before it had begun.
Someone somewhere has persuaded us it’s not as important as the job at the desk, the ride up the greasy pole — and a lack of Federal arts policy doesn’t help.
Portfolios are statements of intention, of what a Government’s priorities are and what it considers matters most to Australians.
It reminds me of Gert Biesta’s discussion of the interaction of qualification, socialization and subjectification in the creation of a good education.