Cartoon descriptions? How else to describe a cartoon world?
📑 When a mum breastfeeding her baby sparks outrage, we’re focusing on the wrong things
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.
Virginia Trioli’s reflection on focusing on the wrong thing to me is another highlight to the challenges of having conversations in the modern world? This again has me thinking about Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens’ discussion of contempt. For me, this is all nicely captured in Tony Martin’s Sizzletown, a podcast that is hilariously funny, until you realise the truth associated with so much of the commentary. I guess here I fall back on my oft repeated quote from Peter Goldsworthy ‘Maestro’: