Memories

I staggered out of the house today before 10am; a relative Herculean task on a weekend. I’m not lazing in bed of course. The body clock as always is set to 6am. But I potter about mindlessly for a bit, engage in enraged outbursts at the programs on IView or Al Jazeera as I do some housework and generally meander my way through to eggs on toast at some stage.

I was to meet an old school student (well she’s not old- but I taught her a few years ago) at a place of her choosing. I engaged my GPS map thingy and as usual the voice wouldn’t work. I narrowly missed smashing into a blue Accord as I fiddled with the volume- rechecking the mute was off, checking the media sound… nothing. Half way down Ginninderra Drive nothing had changed on the map. So I press it off and on again. Worked for a bit and then would stop when I made a turn. I checked the location, I switched it off and on again 6 times. It tried to send me in swooningly varied locations all around the city, everywhere but where I was supposed to go.

Anyway, I then took the wrong turning into the carpark and headed up the ramp, passing the numerous spots I actually wanted to park in on the ground floor. After an unwanted tour of the carpark I finally found my way back to the ground, parked and ventured out into the rain. I went into the café, looked around and took a seat to wait for my young friend.

The waitress asked me to sign into the check in app. “How do I do that?” No doubt all of you are well versed in this new Covid safety measure. She tried to show me but I was caught at the first hurdle where Google wanted me to sign in. “WTF is my password?!” I tried a couple to no avail. I sent the waitress away while I searched through my list of passwords, so frequently updated, it’s embarrassing. I finally found what it was, signed in, downloaded the app and all was well.

So it’s not that I’m a completely moronic Luddite, I can muddle my way through technology albeit probably the long way, but get there in the end, I do. It’s the remembering the copious number of passwords that throws me. I keep forgetting them. I have a tried and tested way of prompting myself; if for example, it’s my bank password, then the first letter will be “B” for bank. So I choose a city or country that starts with “B” and then add a random year. So I at least can take a stab at a guess. But across my various devices, and not being near my password list for whatever reason, the passwords end up having to be frequently changed and I am left in a state of constant confusion.

I did sign up for Last Pass which is a central hub for passwords. It is a free service that keeps track of all your passwords and even generates them if you so desire. That’s great. But I’ve now forgotten the password to get into the hub. To regain access to many sites, you need to jump through so many hoops (understandably of course) that it leaves one quite frustrated at the end of the hour long process of trying to remember who on April 2004 when you opened the account/app/site membership, was thought to be your favourite pet from the 70’s and who now today, is remembered as your favourite pet. Was it Boris or Hudson or maybe the adorable Bozzy Wozzy or possibly Sebastian? Did I count the Holden EK as my first car or the Datsun as my first new car? And did I think if I said that my first house was in Watson, that someone who vaguely knows my personal information could hack into my account, so I chose to say it was Tenterfield (which technically it was as I was born there)? Who knows what I was thinking in April 2004!

So I’m sitting in the café by myself, conspicuously alone and OLD among the young crowd, using all my mental faculties to find the password for bloody Google when my young friend replies to my message of “Have you forgotten?”

But it was of course me who’d forgotten. I myself had arranged for Sunday, not Saturday. So I ordered the avo toast and downed it alone and defiantly and told them I’d be there again the next day. Hopefully accompanied.

So after 770 words I finally come to – it’s a bitch getting old. I love the freedom to dress how I damned well please, speak how I want, go and do what I want and ignore who I want. I love my brain generally and all that I’ve learned so far and embracing what I’ve yet to learn. I have a lot to teach and much to say and even more to hear which is quite exciting. But after the dreaded experience with Dad’s dementia, I do worry that I might head that way too. I forget words -lethologica (which I had to look up again by the way)-which is supposed to be a symptom of menopause which I left behind a few years ago. I remember saying to Liam, while cooking, “can you please chop the …” I couldn’t for the life of me think of the word. I was staring at the little blighters, had been eating them all my life, but could not recall their name. So in my panic, I described them as best I could using the basic categorisation technique- small, oval, green- and settled on “cut up the not-grapes”.

It was of course olives. I thought that was all over. But here it is back again (or perhaps I’ve forgotten and it’s been with me the whole time). My students love it. I am mid lecture, pacing the room, full of passionate bluster and then I stop suddenly and surprisingly. I look confused, I look at them pleadingly, I try the categorisation technique… and the students always come up with helpful suggestions. “United Nations? Melody? Accompany? Hyperbole?(well done that student) Sardines?

We all, I am told, suffer from the WTFAIDH syndrome. You jump up from your seat with a clear purpose and confident stride across the room to the… laundry? No it was study. Get to the study and look about for a cue. (What the Fuck am I doing here?) Bookshelf, desk, sofabed, plant, handbag, computer… Wrack brain. No, it’s gone. Go back and retrace your steps and hopefully your thoughts. Sit down again on the lounge. Random thoughts: cat sleeping on chair (oh to be a cat), dinner, should have done my meditation, sore leg, am I hungry? No it’s gone.

Where does it go?! The thought to mobilise you from deep in the throes of the fantasy of the delicious Nathan Fillion in Castle and the case of the murdered art auctioneer. It was imperative that you go to the study then to retrieve/ check something. It got you up from your comfortable slouch FFS. Why does it go? Why in ten steps does it just vanish like a Bermuda Triangle of the brain. It was a blip on the radar and then it was gone. UFO’s? Supernatural magic? Like single socks and the pen you JUST HAD IN YOUR HAND. Where do they vanish to?!

I’d like to think that it’s because I’m so bright, my thoughts are working at such lightning speeds that it’s difficult for anyone other than a supercomputer to keep up. But realistically, someone who often doesn’t know what day it is and consistently puts food on the stove and walks away until smoke alerts me to the fact that an unwatched pot will boil dry, is not really that clever.

So I'm left with; part of aging is becoming forgetful or looming dementia. Or both. I can memorise my 25 new students’ names in a couple of lessons but can’t remember my favourite student from last semester. It’s uncanny. They come bounding up to you to tell you how much you mean to them and how they so much enjoyed your class and you look at them and know who they are, but not what they’re called. What is that? Do we even know how the memory works? Why is it so elusive? Why can I remember Carmelito racing round our yard when I was eight but not the month long tour of Europe on a bus when I was 22? I know the alcohol played a large part in the latter, but still. You’d think I’d remember something.

I know a little about encoding, storage and retrieval. And it’s the retrieval that I'm focussed on right now. It’s the split second thought that vanishes that fascinates me. That “I have to go get…” and in two steps it’s gone. So I'm thinking that I have a storage problem – not so much retrieval- as I think that my thought doesn’t even make it to storage. I have decided I lack shelf stackers. No one’s there to pick up the newly arrived stock. The truck bay’s empty. And someone must come along and pilfer the goods. Bloody thief.

But uncannily, sometimes this thief returns the goods at 2.46 am. You awaken and recall that you had to just check that you’d paid the electricity bill on your laptop in your study. The thought had arisen because there’d been a power outage during Castle that only lasted a couple of minutes, but it had alerted you to the fact that life would be unbearable without electricity and you’d better not piss of ACTEW- and then did you pay the electricity bill?

Stress can cause forgetfulness. Yes, yes. I know that. But I'm not stressed watching Castle. So what’s going on?

Short term memory lasts between 15 and 30 seconds. And therein lies my problem. In hauling my aged butt up from the lounge 12 precious seconds have already elapsed. STM also entails remembering up to 7 bits of information at any one time. In getting up from the lounge, my focus is now on; where’s my thongs?, ow my knee hurts, if you don’t start exercising you great tubby lard arse you won’t be able to move in a  couple of years, God imagine being so obese and lazy you end up literally growing into the sofa, get out of the way Tut I'm trying to get up, don’t do the “I know you’re going alone and I'm coming with you” Cassie- I’ll be right back, maybe I’ll just have a small bowl of chips before dinner- and there you have it. 7 bits of information overriding my STM first memory of got to check if I’ve paid the electricity bill. But I suppose one must focus on the positive. Like a reconfigured game of Cluedo, at least I remembered the room.

Power and Responsibility

On Al Jazeera yesterday morning, there was a news story about the protests in Thailand. The source of unrest was over the king’s wealth. His personal worth, is said to be over 40 billion dollars. Up until a few months ago, this was legally in ‘trust’ for the people, but he’s since transferred the money into his own coffers.

Where did that wealth in both monetary and land assets come from, do you suppose?

He was born into wealth- royalty is. He inherited much and as such, had the capacity to access more wealth as the wealthy can- the maxim is true- money begats money. It’s a simple fact that you need money to make money- investing, buying up property that appreciates etc.

This situation is the foundation for most of the wealthy across the globe- they just keep getting richer and richer. And that’s great for them. It’s part of the beauty of Capitalism- you can accrue wealth and improve your position. But the simple fact is, that it really only works for the already rich. Of course some can break through the glass ceiling due to their own ingenuity; Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk… And that’s the myth that most people cling to to justify the wonder of Capitalism; it’s possible to make it rich in this economic system.

Some time ago, I also saw another program on Al Jazeera- the Slum- about the horrendous living conditions for those in the Tondo in the Philippines. The series followed the beautiful people, born into poverty who were desperately just trying to feed and shelter their families. One man worked day and night in the rubbish tip to find items to sell. It would take him 2 days to accumulate enough to feed the family. He was also trying to find the money to keep his bright daughter in school. She was the family’s way out of poverty. If she could graduate, she might find a good job that would improve their conditions. But then a cooking fire went wrong and tore through the Tondo and they lost everything- the meagre possessions of families in poverty, gone… and so the story goes.

Many do not think about the capacity of the poor to overcome unexpected expenses. My fridge breaks down, I am blessed enough to actually be able to fairly quickly replace it. For Tondo residents, there is no such economic safety net of savings, not when you live hand to mouth. If your child gets sick (which one of his did) he had no choice but to wade through the woefully inadequate public system to try and save her precious life. This meant he had to be at the hospital with her and so couldn’t work to feed the family. Do you see the horror here?

It’s a vicious cycle that is no fault of the children born into it, but doomed by a failed system in pretty much all countries that leave the poor unable to climb out of the abyss of constant debt. Our Tondo resident had to borrow what he could just to survive the next few days. This happens often enough and you are soon drowning. You become a captive slave to your debtor who must recoup his loss by way of your actual body. And you don’t have a hope in Hades of ever repaying it, so your children are then trapped in indebted bondage as well; generational slavery.

It’s not their fault.

But we all bleat on about Human Rights don’t we? Particularly if you’re talking about me. I want to make sure I have my rights! We all generously agree that every human on the planet has the right to food and water, to live in freedom, to have some form of shelter… Yes. Of course.

But for most of the world’s population, the small, inconsequential, unknown, impoverished people of our planet, this just doesn’t happen.

Whose fault is it? Bad luck? Their own stupidity?

So here we come to my questions. What is it that the human being needs? Well, the United Nation’s Human Rights Declaration just about covers it all. There are 30 of them. In a nutshell, every single one of us has the inalienable right to have enough food to more than survive, clean water, a home or living space that entails some form of privacy for yourself, safety, freedom of movement… The reality is that for most of the planet, this simply isn’t the case.

Next question: Just how much money do you need? How many houses do you need? Or shoes, or cars, or clothes…? When is it enough? Can it be too much?

Surely if you’ve accumulated more wealth than you can spend in one lifetime there’s an issue of surplus? Whose money is it anyway? Yes, you’ve ‘earned it’ but how? Was privilege involved? Then what obligations do you have to those whose rights were infringed by your making money?

If you’ve made money on the back of your country, your employees, First Nations People (ie. stole their land in the first place) do you have an obligation to share your wealth after your own needs are met?

It’s an ethical question.

To me it’s quite clear in the case of the king of Thailand. Your job, your sole responsibility, is the people of your nation. If even one of your children is living in dire poverty, you are responsible to ensure their life becomes bearable. This is a moral obligation. How can you live a lavish and privileged lifestyle (essentially given to you by the people) and have no responsibility to them? It is immensely dishonourable. I suggest he keep $1 billion for his own play fund and return the other 39 billion to the people to ensure their wellbeing- each and every one of the 69.9 million of them.

If under the capitalist system profit becomes all, then the lives that your company impacts are inconsequential. The recent Royal Commission Inquiry into aged care showed that chasing profits resulted in many corners cut in order to appease the shareholders. Under this system, the shareholders become your society to whom you’re beholden. Shareholders and Profit.

How can you take a trip to the Bahamas and luxuriate on the beach with carefree disregard to what is happening in order to ensure your annual holiday? At the home that funds your respite, there are retirees, old, alone and intensely vulnerable, forced to eat swill in order to cut corners on meals, suffer in health due to inadequate care because overworked and immorally underpaid staff are struggling to keep up with those in their care. People are left in dirty nappies, remain unbathed, unfed and their wounds untended. These, the people who are our fathers and mothers and grandparents.

Privatisation is a disaster. In the prison system, aged care, water, even childcare. These aspects of society should be under the aegis of the government- in the hands of the people because it’s our mothers and fathers in those homes, our children in those care centres, our water, our brothers and sisters in prison and it is only care that will ensure justice not profit driven avarice.

Much study has been done around empathy and the rich. It’s been found that the higher the wealth, the lower the empathy. I also read an interesting article that suggested that the wealthy are empathetic to those closest to their own socio economic group and then it drastically declines the further down the social scale those ‘others’ are- I guess that’s the theory of the ‘great unwashed’ in action.

When will the super wealthy be held accountable? When will Capitalism be seen for what it is- an unmitigated disaster for the poor? When will each of us take responsibility for our actions, not just within our own elite circles, but in our society and in our world?

We must come to realise that within this world, this universe, we are all connected. It is a magnificent ecosystem on which each creature is impacted by the other. When working to its optimum, it is a finely balanced miracle. This profit driven frenzy of the post Industrial age is what is causing climate change and the massive destruction of our globe. We could all live in peace and harmony, as trite as that sounds, if we’d all take responsibility for our sphere of influence- your general population recycle, re-use etc, companies actively work to reduce carbon emissions and engage in ethically sustainable processes, governments criminalise forest destruction, and the super wealthy spread the love to those desperately in need.

We could all live happy lives if we learned to accept the realities of where our wealth came from and share it around. We need to learn about the concept of we and not just me. As David Hall (Professor at ACU and Marist brother) says, we need to stop the nonsense about ‘I am more special than you’- and the idea that I can only be more special, at your expense.

Ubuntu is an African concept; I am because we are. Social cohesion is a simple matter of reframing our current mindset of scarcity and hoarding to one of share the love around so we can all live happy lives. We really won’t miss out on much and gain a whole world of peace.

Scarcity

This week’s ponderings all started, as I’m sure it often does for great thinkers, with toilet paper. You may have followed my saga on Facebook where Cassie and I made daily dashes to the front door at the slightest sound from outside as we were anxiously awaiting the promised delivery of toilet paper from Who Gives a Crap. It was getting dire. I was down to rationing; experimenting with first 7 sheets, and then 5. Just how many folds is needed to keep both, my hands dry, and at the same time, the necessary mop up operation at the optimally frugal level? It was a trial. It was at moments terrifying to contemplate the consequences. Our local store had not seen toilet paper in a month and while murmurings on social media made promises of sightings at various locations across town, the arrival would only end in bitter disappointment when rushing into the store, I’d find once again, the shelves were bare. Curse my old legs for not being fast enough.

And then there were the mocking posts on social media of initially innocent-seeming pieces about adorable cats leaping over walls of toilet paper rolls, as though launching some sort of Cat Olympics. But I saw through those immediately. It was nothing to do with the cats. It was flaunting their wealth of toilet paper. I have so many rolls, my cat is struggling to leap over the Great Wall of Chipping Norton that I can afford to build.

So then as soon as the box of loo paper arrived, like a miracle on the eve of the opening of the final roll ceremony planned for this morning in fact, I realised this whole event was actually a metaphorical representation of the great existential question of just how much is enough?

I could up until yesterday, begin to see the beauty in hoarding. I could feel the creeping accretion of callous self interest overtaking my usually phlegmatic and generous nature; the desire to throw little old ladies (older than me obviously) aside with a kick for good measure, (you don’t want them getting up for another go) to reach the last pack and stuff it into my trolley and be damned with their disapproving looks. Who cares what they think?! I now have toilet paper.

There was a glory, I could imagine, to be had in casually lying on the floor with a camera and filming cats leaping over your amassed wealth. There would be a shroud encompassing you in an almost spiritual euphoria of wellbeing; all was well with the world. How God must have felt at the close of each day’s labour; “And God saw it was good.” I know because I now had that feeling enveloping me in a tender caress. I have enough toilet paper. I will see out this plague. And without an unfortunate need for octogenarian violence.

And so with my many rolls of toilet paper, I sat on my loo and revelled in the soft tinkle of my bodily function, resting assured that the Great Experiment was now over. I could now grab great fistfuls of paper to see to my ablutions. I could without the slightest worry, in fact waste as much as I wanted.

And that brought me to the concept of scarcity.

I thought firstly about all those people in the world who never have toilet paper. I thought about that unfortunate time in Malaysia with the hose, the purpose for which I had no idea until it was far too late. I thought about those for whom it’s a luxury and they spend their entire lives experimenting with optimally frugal levels because they just don’t have the money to replace it when it runs out. They live their entire lives without a pantry or any backup food or necessities because they’re never in a position of having spare cash to allow a build up of back up. That’s how most of the world live. So why do we in the West panic?

Much of our Western world is built on this concept; we just don’t have enough. I need to have great swathes of loo paper, mountains of canned beans and pasta and rice in the pantry in case the family gather en masse for an impromptu dinner. The fact I only have 2 sons and a brother who never visit is irrelevant; it’s what everyone else does. It’s what our political systems seem bent on maintaining; a constant state of fear of missing out and not having enough. And this led me to a much more sober subject that all started with the idea of scarcity. The world can’t feed its population. Apparently.

I was watching the Political something or other of Population Control on Al Jazeera this morning, that looked at the astounding fact that in India and China and South Korea there is such a dearth of women that there has been a sharp rise in female child abductions, prostitution, trafficking and violence against women in the past decade or more.

What?

In the 1950’s the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Institute and the International Planned Parenthood Federation, among others, gathered together and the predominantly white male members sought to do something about the exploding world population. World hunger was an issue they wished to tackle. They believed that there were insufficient supplies of food for everyone so they saw the need to reduce the population. In Third World countries. They didn’t tackle poverty directly, but reduced the number of children that the poor had in order to achieve that aim.

Vast amounts of money was donated to various programs around the world- paying for sterilisations in India, abortions in South Korea and pressure put on China which resulted in the One Child Policy. Monetary incentives were offered to millions of the poor in India for sterilisations. In 1975, Indira Ghandi forced 8 million sterilisations on both men and women.

Henry Kissinger wrote a paper recommending an increase in abortions and the US pressured these countries to legalise the procedure despite cultural abhorrence. Effective advertising campaigns were launched, playing on the already heavy cultural proclivity for male children. In addition, the US made available new technologies that could determine the sex of foetuses, thus contributing to the push for abortions of all female babies. This played well into the existing cultural preferences for male heirs and the rates of abortions in India, South Korea and China sky rocketed.

All during a time when American women were protesting at home to push for abortion rights that the Congress refused to consider.

The female population is now so low in India, there are tens of thousands of men who can find no wife. Cue such events as Sejina being stolen from her village in northern India. After months of pushing the police to search for her, they finally found her in another village, married off to one man and hired out to 7 others in the village who used her as a sex slave.

Research in India has shown that the higher the male population, the higher the violence against women. Crime rates are high among young, single males and remain so until the men are married. What? Respect for women is low and yet there’s a cultural expectation that you are not a man until you are married. So many young men have no hope of that and are so “desperate” they commit horrific crimes against women. What?

There have never in its history, been higher rates of abortions than today in India. The desire for male heirs is still prevalent and women so disregarded as to be viewed as chattels. One woman spoke of her wealthy and well-placed father-in-law forcing her to have 6 abortions in 8 years and when still she couldn’t provide a male heir, they cast her out- social death in India. So this is not just an issue for the uneducated poor.

In China 1 in 5 men cannot find a wife and every Sunday in Shanghai there’s a market where mothers gather with portfolios of their sons and daughters to try and find the best deal for their child in a massively limited market of female brides. China has had a rapid increase in female child abductions. A girl can cost up to $8000. The kidnappers take the young girls to a family who raise her alongside their son until it’s time to marry. If the son does not wish to marry her, she can be sold on to another family for a tidy profit.

In South Korea, the situation is the same and it can cost as much as $10000 for a Vietnamese wife for the men who are desperately seeking a wife in a population that is short on women due to female abortions through the sixties and seventies. To acerbate this, modern South Korean women are choosing not to have children, despite government monetary incentives to increase pregnancies. The government has now reversed its policy and advertisements and government education is now pushing abortion as murder in a bid to curb the practice and bring the population back into balance. China too has done an about face and introduced a ‘2 child policy’ in the hope that the gender inequity may find an equilibrium.

But it seems to me that much of the problem is exactly the same as it was in the fifties with the decision by the rich white dudes to get rid of world overpopulation by getting rid of poor babies. I see how you can justify that, but all that happened was an increase in grossly undervaluing women, using their bodies to their own ends.

Had they then, as they should now, engaged in spending their millions of dollars on education instead of spurious and barbaric population control methods, they would have achieved a reduction in births without all the heartache, rapes and bloodshed. African research has shown that women given an education inevitably put off child rearing for further education and do not have as many children. Education too would see men being taught to value women as is their human right. These countries have now seen that without women, there is no country eventually. Who’d have thought?

Perhaps we need to educate the rich white dudes.

Why are Australians struggling with the concept of staying at home?

For many, the Coronavirus pandemic seemingly ‘came out of nowhere’, despite years of warnings from scientists that it was inevitable. And it was inevitable. The history of pandemics goes back thousands of years, the first recorded, the Antonine plague, accounting for 5 million deaths including, quite possibly, Marcus Aurelius, then Roman emperor, towards the end of its ravages in the year 180 BCE. In the modern era, with the advent of globalisation and the explosion of international travel, it was only a matter of time before a localised outbreak spread with deadly speed beyond its borders out into the whole world.

I remember a Year 8 student once groaning before a HUMS class about the need for the lesson. “Just why do we have to learn about history- who cares?” Well I can sympathise with his youthful ignorance concerning seemingly irrelevant events long before his parents stepped upon the earth, but there is actually a very good reason beyond the initial fascination in finding out about how others have lived their lives before us. And that is to determine just why we’re here, at this place, in this way and why we behave in the current circumstances, the way we do.

I was lamenting our topic on a group call yesterday about how the Gen X’ers in particular are constantly harping on about when the current restrictions to our freedom will be over. It’s only been a couple of weeks, yet you’d think we’d been incarcerated for several months. And I think their lack of resilience lies in our past.

My dear friend whose 80th birthday celebrations I was meant to attend in England in March, calls herself a ‘war baby’. She has already been in self isolation for a month due to her age (and she lives alone). She has taken the extraordinary step of cutting up an old sheet to make toilet tissues which she bleaches and washes daily. It’s her ‘little bit’ she attests, to keeping down the run on toilet paper. I can hear the howls of protest already about it ‘being disgusting’ etc. (not aware that many generations were raised with cloth nappies). But the point, my dear reader, is that my friend is familiar with deprivations and instead of howling in protest at life’s unfairness, she is simply getting on with it and doing her little bit. Quite simply, because she has experienced this before; enforced deprivation. This pandemic while heartbreaking, has not ‘rocked her world’ or sent her into a paroxysm of shocked disbelief.

Baby Boomers are products of a generation of war babies who had experienced the First World War, the Great Depression (to that date) and World War II. They lived through bombings in their home towns, strict rationing of foods, calls to engage in labour in support of the war effort, curfews, deaths and trauma. And you must remember that this state of deprivation went on for YEARS, not weeks. Given their experiences, what sort of parents would they make?

Post war 50’s saw in the Western world in particular, an affluence that grew the middle classes and unemployment rates plummet. Many people could now afford a car and a house and a television. These parents wanted their children to be educated (my dad had never gone beyond Year 8) and get a secure job. Security was everything. Some form of control over an unknown future was everything. They pushed their kids to study hard and ‘make something of themselves’ in order to cushion them from the ills that these parents knew could so easily and ‘out of nowhere’ hit you.

They wanted their kids to have things they’d never had. My mum remembered that for the Christmases of her youth, she always received an orange and some walnuts and perhaps a small toy if the year was going well. One year she received a doll and she never forgot it.  And then I think of the numerous gifts they lavished on my brother and I each Christmas- wanting us to have ‘everything they never had’. My father worked two jobs (a day clerical position and a night time cleaning job) for years to keep the family afloat. He worked hard. And when my brother was old enough, my mum went to work too and she worked hard as well. So with that background, what sort of parents would we make?

You reap what you sow. There’s no damned getting away from it. Baby Boomers are responsible for the current state of the world, already in the grip of the consequences of the climate crisis. The spoilt generation who had always got most of what they wanted and gotten it quickly. The generation who were better educated, inheriting some form of assets from frugal parents to add to their share portfolios. The generation who lived as their parents wanted them to; as if there were no tomorrow. So, their parenting style? Well, the answer is the Millennials and the Gen X’ers. So what sort of people are they?

When the pandemic hit Australia, the response was disbelief- a little bit of Trump’s “Chinese virus” slipping into the rhetoric- a bit of denial that it’s got anything to do with our proud nation. A bit of the ‘she’ll be right’ attitude into the mix and you’ve got Bondi Beach full of patrons the day a lockdown is called for. I think what concerned me most was the attitude of the Gen X’ers (not all obviously) - that it was an ‘old people’ disease and they wouldn’t be affected, so let’s party. Let’s all pretend it’s a Zombie Apocalypse and we’re characters out of the Walking Dead. It’s a bit of a laugh. There was no immediate concern for the elderly and vulnerable in our society. There was just ridicule and conspiracy theories and attitudes that almost sounded like “we don’t care if old people die”. Have we really raised our children to not have an immediate empathetic reaction? Is that the true picture?

Are we so far removed from the notion of community that we literally revert to me and mine only? The toilet paper run and hoarding seems to indicate that might be the case. There was a strongly selfish reaction to the threat of the disease. Fear and panic ran riot among conspiracy theories and fear mongering and fake news. I am grateful that that seems to have calmed, that people are realising that Australia in particular is not at threat of insufficient food resources. Or toilet paper for that matter. We just have to be patient as the supply chains catch up.

It’s the uncertainty that seems to be upsetting people. I heard an ad for The Feed where a young woman was saying she was not the type of person who coped well with uncertainty. I’m sorry young lady, none of us are. It’s called being human. We don’t like change and we don’t like not being in control, even though that is almost always an illusion. We are in fact, in control of nothing much except ourselves. What comes out of our mouths and what goes into it. And even that is fraught with social conditioning, media manipulation and psychological predispositions.

This generation conditioned to immediate gratification is becoming undone by the lack of that old virtue, patience. They don’t have any. They have no idea of the history that taught their grandparents that life is indeed fragile and fickle. They have no idea of sacrificing for the good of your nation for YEARS without complaint. They have no idea of the concept of the painful but excited wait – saving for a year for that bicycle- because for them it came regular as clockwork at the next birthday or Christmas or even the weekend following the mention of a desire for a bicycle.

As a teacher of teenagers, I hear it all the time- “I’m bored”. When I was at school as a student, the rolling in of the video machine and the tv was such a treat we could hardly contain ourselves. Yet when introducing a film clip to a Year 12 class I was asked how long it would go for- “20 minutes! Are you joking?” It was more than a soundbite and they couldn’t cope. They lost attention and got ‘bored’. They are a generation unused to not being entertained every minute of the day. They are unused to the concept of sitting with themselves and their own thoughts. They are unused to the idea of wandering around in nature just to wander around in nature. They are a generation who do not see the value in being bored and therefore pushed to creativity. They are a generation who do not see the value in lessons from the past, of seeing the value in suffering, in seeing the value in patience… the lessons that only come through pain and discomfort. The only lessons that grow you beyond yourself. And until you grow beyond yourself and your needs for immediate gratification, you are incapable of sacrificing for your community, being patient for months to come. Incapable of refraining from asking “when will this be over?” But just knuckling down and doing your little bit.

Don’t get me wrong. I know some amazing Gen X’ers who are compassionate and empathic and who work hard for their community volunteering and mentoring. And I know there is a plethora of Aussies who as always, have come, hearts to the fore, with that generosity which earnt us an international reputation following the fires.  And I know too, that much of the malaise of this young generation is more to do with their youthful age and inexperience than their character. So I do wonder what lessons will be learnt through the sacrifice that these young people are going to be asked to endure for much longer than they yet realise. I don’t believe it will break them. I believe they are being forged in the fire and will come out of this resilient and like generations before them, a lot wiser.

They will learn their lessons, just as my own father did and me after him. He was frugal to the point of ascetism. He recycled and upcycled before it was a thing. He kept hold of all sorts of strange contraptions and bits of metal and wood and screws and bolts and washers… because you just never knew when you’d need it. He’d seen the long lines at soup kitchens, the wandering swagmen in search of work in the thirties and a world of scarcity during the Second World War in the forties. He’d lived through cancer and his wife’s death. And he knew if you just got on with it and hung in there, it would be ok. I know if dad had lived to see this time, he would have been out in the shed hammering together some bird boxes to hang around the garden. He would have ‘kept busy’ as he always did, pottering around doing the little things he enjoyed. He would have quoted, Ecclesiastes 3, and said everything passes, there is a time for all things. Because he had lived through the lessons of history.