WHY DOESN’T GOD STRIKE

As a spiritual being as opposed to a religious person I have studied relatively keenly on aspects of all models of religion. From Animist to Jain, Buddhist to Shinto and Bahia to Baptist. All of them have one thing in common.

They all want people to be good.

Whether just sitting in  a corner with eyes gazing at your feet, prostrate on the floor eyes fixed on the arse in front, or on your knees with hands clasped staring at a bloodied corpse on a Cross every prayer seems to intend that we be good to ourselves, our family, our friends and even our enemies. It can be a lengthy process sometimes leading to aches and pains deliberately intended by God to test our ability to concentrate on His words. We can turn the other cheek or just shift our sitting position but He seems to like us to suffer physically, at least whilst in His house.

But are we being good?

‘I’m a Christian’ I have heard people loudly proclaim to any passer by as though to say ‘I’m fucking better than you’. But are they good? One may well then ask them if they have broken any of the Commandments lately. If they say NO then they are bloody liars. I would defy anyone, even those who claim marriage for 50 years and never had an argument, that it is impossible to have not broken any of the Old Testament God’s Commandments. The only people who have ceased breaking the rules for anything are dead, passed on, mort.

My argument is, that even after four thousand odd years of being told to be good we still have people breaking the rules. We have spent four thousand years punishing everyone for everything from masturbation to murder, sodomy to suicide, adultery to abduction and rebellion to robbery yet it still goes on. Rape and pillage is still a weapon of war and a reward for killing, in some countries at least, as though the Vikings never went out of fashion and to top it off sometimes with the permission and encouragement of religious leaders.

If there is a God, and don’t give us this shit about his working in mysterious ways, then why does he allow such inhumane acts to happen to any of his children.

If there is a God , all seeing and all knowing and, as some would tell us, responsible for every single thing that happens on earth whether it be animal, mineral or vegetable, that every death is sanctioned by Him, as some would believe, that could allow his children to main, mutilate and murder his other children then he is an incredibly cruel God that nobody should worship EVER.

If there is a God,  and many who claim to have seen him declare that he is a white Anglo-saxon with a Santa Claus beard, garbed in a glowing white bedsheet and pretty sandals, then this would explain how many Christians past and present still claim superiority to any other human tint or hue. It appears men are also superior to women as God is a ‘bloke’.

The book they call the Bible was not written by God, how could he, unless I’ve mistaken what would he have written it on beside those stone tablets Moses came stumbling down the hill with. He had no pens or paper. It would be some time before one of his children developed those particular ideas and that was because some grunting being in a cave took the charred stick he used as a toothbrush from his mouth and realised he could draw a Bison on the wall with it.

If there is a God then he must really hate Golfers as they appear to be the most popular of humans he like to strike with a bolt out of the blue. As a child I believed that the hot footpath walking home from school was the Devil heating it up from underneath, when I was kid a thunderstorm was God moving his furniture around, when I was a kid I used to go to Sunday School where I would learn all about this guy who liked to hang around on Crosses.

When I was no longer a child, when I stopped believing everything any adult told me, including not making funny faces on windy days for fear of permanent disfigurement, as I grew up so did my brain, and my learning and my logics and the only thing that God ever gave me was free will and the reasoning that it was He who allowed his creation to rebel and, in the fullness of time, refuse to recognise His existence.

Having said that I’m about to burn my umbrella, my golf clubs, trees and anything he could use to strike me down. Maybe I should also prepare an apology to Him just in case I don’t go the other way. Oh! God…. How embarrassing.

WHITE IS A DIFFICULT COLOUR

Why is this so? Africa, America, Great Britain, Australia and even New Zealand have historically always had a problem with people of colour. Was it that the invaders we called colonists were all white? Was it that the occupiers believed they were far superior? Even scientists and doctors, researchers and theorists in the pure fields of science came up with theories as to why the ‘paleface’ was more advanced, more civilised and more religious than non-whites. The studies and measurements that proved they had different shaped heads was one of the more serious attempts to prove white supremacy.

Whilst a worker with indigenous children and young people, even though I was a ‘whitey’, it was a disappointing fact that 38% of aboriginal children were under some form of supervision order and 44% of them were in detention. When the aboriginal community make up only around 2% of the population, even smaller than some migrant minorities, this is an horrific figure. Even though juvenile crime is presently on the decline, despite the panic and pessimism of the popular press, young people have double the rate of offending than adults and aboriginals of all ages are 23 times more likely to be locked up compared to their white brethren.

There is cause for optimism however, as indigenous young people begin to utilise more and more of the resources available to them. In the last twenty odd years there has been a reduction of about a third in crimes and subsequent detention of aboriginals in the justice system. There may be cause for pessimism when we have had an increase in crimes perpetrated by minorities from a non-English speaking background. Perhaps the increase is the foreign born population is creating an arithmetical decline and not an actual one. Only more data, over a longer time period, by bureaucrats whose job it is to create statistics for people like myself, may show a more informed trend.

One thing for sure is that my prediction 20 odd years ago that the indigenous population would catch up is coming to fruition. It was only 1965 when aboriginals were counted separately to dingoes and kangaroos. It was not until 1972 that they began getting any rights to themselves, even to their land. The parents of 1988, were, for all intents and purposes only just catching up with the development of the rest of the population, and I don’t mean that in a derogatory way, but in the context of the positive development of the ‘koorie’ community.

For the parents I worked with schooling was virtually non-existent especially if they had come off missions. The majority of youngster I worked with came from either Burke, Kempsey or Wilcannia where aboriginals were particularly and intentionally isolated from the rest of the community. The parents of 1988 were having limited success in getting their children to attend school and these were the children with which I was to become most involved. But I predicted that these children I was working with, by the time they became parents themselves would be ensuring better school attendance for their children. By now one suspects that these parents in 2013 would be just seeing off their youngest to high school and to a far better life than their parents or grandparents are still enduring.

The Block in Redfern is no longer a ‘no-go-zone’ for firemen, ambulances and even police vehicles. It is no longer a haven for heroine and cocaine dealers, no longer a place you could not park a car or even stop at a traffic light without a problem. Maybe the aboriginal community of Redfern-Waterloo have had their ‘Road to Gundagai’ moment too.

Years ago during the women’s movement it was known that women worked twice as hard, twice as long and twice as diligently as their male counterparts just to prove they were equal with men. Many things have changed since then, except equal pay, and women are now accepted as 98% equal to men. There are still pockets of resistance in big business, which can be overcome with time, amongst chauvinists who have been taught since boys by their abusive fathers that women are inferior, and amongst conservative religious leaders who insist that as God is a man therefore all men must be superior. Over the last fifty years our aboriginal community, given the right resources and encouragement have forged ahead by at least 200 white years.

Back in the 60’s while making documentaries about our aboriginal community it was written  in the narration that ‘these aboriginals you see here are almost civilised’. In the 60’s we thought that was an interesting fact but today we might cringe in horror at the comment. The little old ladies who feared that we could not mix with blacks or Australia would end up chocolate coloured, or the insistence of government workers in aboriginal affairs that they would eventually ‘become extinct’ anyway. All this helped to ingrain in the pensioners of today a continuing disdain for anything black.

On a more humorous note an aboriginal lady at a conference, wearing an all white outfit, dropped cigarette ash on herself. In endeavouring to wipe it off she mumbled distinctly that white was a bloody difficult colour. Then she looked up at the sea of white faces and went a distinctive burgundy colour with realisation of what she had said. The funny thing is she was bloody right. It is not black but white that is the difficult colour.

Marketing LINTON - Idea #3

Via Crucis

There is a town nearby where I have noticed a wooden exercise device on one of the streets. I’m not sure if this is a one-off affair or part of a circuit set up by Pyrenees Council. The seed has been planted.

I also took delight in seeing an older gentleman, I think he was in his 40’s, running along Happy Valley Road away from his car which was parked at the intersection with the Linton-Naringhal Rd. Two things may have been happening, his car was about to go up with a mighty big bang or he was jogging a few kilometers for exercise. Both events being rather dangerous considering the horrific traffic jams that can occur around Happy Valley when Mum's are out to pick up their kids from school.

And that’s really where the idea came from. Many local councils, even the more parsimonious ones like Golden Pains, have established these circuits for the more energetic citizens to huff and puff there way around with safety.

Not that I’m one of those anyway. You could say that marketing people exercise their mouth more than their brain. Looking at the sky constitutes a chin-up and raising my arms is absolutely exhausting.

There are at least twelve jumps, jerks or back-injury exercises which can be identified for such a course. It could start and end at the Recreation Reserve for clothes and other extraneous gear like brains to be left, wend its way around the rail trail and then around the streets of the town.

Maybe some of these twelve ‘actual’ exercises I have found could be part of the course.

Butt-ups

Preacher Curls

Clean and Press

Stomach Vacuum

Flatbench Leg Pull

Gorilla Chin Crunch

Donkey Calf Raises

Standing Head Harness

Stiff Legged Dumbell Deadlift

Weighted Ball Hyperextension

Iron Cross and Iron Cross with Bar

and the ever popular

Decline Close Grip Bench to Skull Crusher

Maybe calling it ‘Stations of the Cross’ (because there are twelve stops) might not be that attractive to some devotees of the art of exercise, or religiously inclined, but I’m sure someone around town will have a gem of an idea about what to call it.

Il mese più prossimo, Butch

IF YOU BREAK IT YOU PAY FOR IT

Wikileaks was right, a good government has no need to keep secrets from its electors. Admittedly little porkies have to be told now and then just as we mere mortals do to protect ourselves or the other people around us. That is acceptable behaviour but to deliberately hide the processes of determining the law and how to formulate new ones should be out in the open and public.

Guess what. In Australia as with other democracies it is.  It is just that we can’t be bothered to watch them being created, and frankly, don’t have the paid time to waste watching the process evolving. It would be more productive if we just went outside and watched the grass grow.

One reason we don’t participate is that these processes are so shrouded in protocol and ritual, rules of order, mysterious procedures, confronting participants, confusing conclusions, convoluted and in Latin the language of law not the language of the people. There are dozens of wherefores and art thou’s, parties of the first, second and third parts, respondents, defendants, witness tampering, whips and slings, speakers, registrars, notes and minutes larger than telephone books and all the legal paraphernalia that enables lobbying by special interest groups like the Lone-legged Vegans Association and the League of Cycling Lycra Lovers.

It is a pity that we have to trust people we can’t trust but had to elect because nobody sensible put their hand up. Where are the statesmen and not politicians, where are the ordinary people and not the party hacks and arse-lickers or Union executives elected in return for little favours, like being allowed to root prostitutes on the Unions Credit Card. Where are the people who are altruistic and don’t have an agenda or their own selfish interests to protect? Where are the laws that apply to ordinary people that don’t apply to our elected officials?

Bureaucracy loves things to be over-complicated. It employs people just to translate the rules not just apply them. It is a self-preservation society intent on creating it’s own planets within the universe of government. Bureaucracy loves duplication because it creates competing power bases each intent on making their department the biggest, best, brightest, fattest and least productive. When executive salaries are linked to the number of people they get to boss around rather than the effectiveness of your realm, then we have a veritable army of competing interests each soaking up their proportion of the taxpayers dollar.

Then there is the spin. Top spin from the government, bottom spin from the opposition, yarn spin from the media and salad spin from the members dining room. The various spin cycles, timed for the next news cycle, are simply the re-interpretation of truth, cooks call it garnish, that makes everything look cheaper, faster, smarter, simpler and tastier than really are.

Why do we have the same departments at State and Federal and even some at Local Level as well? The Health Department is a prime example. If we had hospitals, medical centres, health and safety officers and pork rind inspectors at all levels controlled by one authority then that might be OK. But we only have two levels of Health - Government and Private - so why three levels of health officials? Health and Safety are almost costing us the equivalent of wages and salaries if you tack on all the compliance costs and health officials keep on adding new ones. Who invents the ideas for new rules is anyone’s guess.

An example might be in the extra-ordinary and unnecessary cost for nursing homes to widen the doors, not for wheelchairs or obese patients, but so a coffin can be removed without a twist or turn. I don’t think the occupant gives a bugger about whether their feet or head go first. There is an example of un-necessary regulation in the United States where the anti-abortion lobby in one state required all abortion clinics to have corridors a minimum of five feet wide. Not to facilitate health and safety but to drive the clinics out of business with costs that supporters and patients can ill afford to bare. 

Then we have three levels of builders of roads, footpaths, bridges and wombat under-passes. Expressways that don’t express, Freeways that aren’t free and bike lanes that we car drivers pay for but can’t use. We have them at every level as well. Working out who owns what, is responsible for and repairs what is a complicated process. The feds pay the states and the states pay the municipality, feds build these roads, state builds those roads, municipalities build our roads and developers of land pay to fill in all the gaps. It doesn’t matter who takes the high road or who runs along the low nobody, but nobody gets their share before the bureaucrats. Pot holes never get repaired because you have to first prove how they got there, who owns them and who should repair them.

The wages and salaries to run things can absorb half of the money allocated to any project. Linton’s Replica Railway Station funded from federal money through the state to the shire absorbed three levels of administrative costs before it even got to the builders. By the time the builders made their profit maybe less than a third of the money was left. This is probably why we only got a third of the original project as  planned.

I’ll cease this months diatribe before you regret it. But I am personally sick and tired of businesses big and small complaining about wages and salaries when it is really the cost of complying with all the rules and regulations, whether or not it’s fresh plastic gloves every time you touch a different food, automatic fire sprinklers over each kitchen appliance and one for the whole kitchen as well, that no food is sold without a licence and from an approved kitchen, that its packaged right, handled right, packed right and served right. That steps are clearly marked with lurid colours, which is useless if your colour blind. That we have fire warning devices inside our home that does nothing to prevent your house going up in flames from the outside. Maybe we should regulate nature as well we have damn well regulated everything else.

Mankind has lasted in this country without refrigeration and plastic gloves. They deliberately set fire to the land, they ate stuff raw, threw it on a fire guts and all before eating it, in bad times they stuffed their mouth with anything they could find, not even a dragon fly was safe and they survived for 40,000 fucking years. Food has not changed so why should we, genetics has not changed so why should we, people still root each other in every orifice so why change, babies are still born somewhere between a five-star maternity suite and a shit ingrained dirt floor so why should we change.

We have too many regulators and to many regulations, you can never regulate stupidity nor can it be eradicated like common diseases. We cannot prevent people from being stupid even if they are wearing a crash helmet. We can still get sick from inhaling air so why stop smoking, some men still beat the shit out of their wives in drunken rages yet we still drink.

Lets just privatised the whole rotten system and then we will see efficiency at its finest as everyone strives to make money and not waste it. Lets take away all laws which protect people from themselves, maybe nature will take its course and all stupid people will eventually disappear. We only need laws to protect other people from us but not ourselves. As living entities given free will we can decide what is best for ourselves, if we get sick or even kill ourselves that’s our problem. Let their be one over-all rule, and start by not inventing a new one but using an old one,

‘If you break it you pay for it’.