AFTERMATH

There they were in this intimate space.
We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.
"There is no threat." The sign swung through his head and settled into the warm air of summer. 
It was the coldest summer he could remember, wet, drizzy, unfriendly in parts. But  now, just when the days were beginning to shorten, it was warm again.
A friendly face smiled. A secret knowledge.
"I'm cold blooded," he said. "My temperature runs below normal. Like a lizard on a rock, needs warming."
To come to life. 
As if he'd been a reptile in a former life. A Berber. A minor royalty. At the palace. A favourite slave. Head of the harem. Lying awake at night waiting. The circus, this species, this planet, his consciousness soared over tiny suburban houses. 
"The advantages of a stable relationship," he thought, as he relaxed at a well established home. 
Such beauties of place were denied him. 
"I love him."
They were sex obsessed miscreants, they were people who just got up and went to work every day. They were the sprawling masses preyed on by the worst government in Australian history. They were standing at a precipice in history and nobody was holding them back. Like the ambitious young journalist Zoey in House of Cards, shoved under a train. Pushed over a cliff. Stumbling into a doomed future. Nobody cried out: stop. 
Least of all the Prime Minister, whose daily announcements in the past few days had included a fund for victims of institutional sex abuse, a national apology to the same. For claims so old they could almost never be proven, not really. Nobody denied that bad things had happened. But this was a government that cultivated a climate of false accusation. And rewarded the perpetrators. 
This cabal was never going to look at the behaviour of their own offspring, the family courts, the children's courts, the corrupt psychologists and absurd rules of evidence. That this day, today, children were being court ordered into abusive and dysfunctional situations. That fostering children, ripping them off biological parents and farming them out, had become a secret, multi-billion dollar industry. That they were all guilty. That they all had blood on their hands. 
Instead, they persecuted the Catholic Church. As if in some altered, parallel universe they themselves, their caste, their class, were not guilty of the most heinous of crimes. Of lying to the public. Constantly. Of perpetuating a war on the nuclear family that was in itself massively destructive. 
A government which treated its citizens with such contempt was not fit to govern. 
But, if it could be classified as governance, they got up everyday and fed the Prime Minister, Herr Turnbull, his announceable for the day. Whatever shit it was.
As long as a story was running, as long as his ugly mug, narrowing face, greying hair, glistening skin, growing more Mussolini-like by the day, was droning away on television screens everywhere, he didn't care what the content was. 
As if to impress on the rest of us, this show pony of shallow character, yes this terrible caricature of a leader, that he would dominate: that the tricky lawyers who ruled them had won the day.
The man who never shut up.  Never stopped talking. Never displayed one ounce of humility. The man who thought he was better than everybody else. 
His media adviser should be shot, Old Alex sometimes thought. Only to revise the thought for public consumption. You couldn't say those things these days. His media officer adviser should be sacked. Oh that's right, he's his own media adviser.
And so the farce of Australia stumbled towards an uncertain future. Uniquely divided. Into ethnic groups. Into haves and have nots. Into harrowing horizons and rampant greed. 
Into the Balkanisation of its own soul. The abandonment of historic ethos. The loss of culture. The destruction of an ideal: participatory democracy. 
Into a place where there was no darkness, not for the ruled. 
Only for the ruling class, who, indeed, had much to hide and could afford the luxury of privacy.
The narrow voices of protest would fulfil their destiny. We are advancing on all fronts. Against a visually invincible enemy. Based on the evidence so far. 
But you will not win. 

Learned helplessness is a term that originates in animal biology, referring to eventual loss of mental capability to respond to some discomforting stimulus when the physical ability to respond is removed through repeated cycles of constraint. In human psychology, it describes the loss of the individual’s ability to respond to any situation, “with the eventual result that people give up without even trying”.
Examples of human failure to respond to extreme circumstances abound, where individuals fail to leave burning buildings or sinking ships, seemingly paralysed by fear.
We must consume because it is expected of us and we comply. Cairns, George, Do We have the power to overcome 'learned helplessness', The Conversation, 7 February, 2012. 

THE BIGGER STORY:




A 24-year-old Bangladeshi woman has been remanded in custody after appearing in court charged over what police allege was an "Islamic State-inspired attack" following a stabbing incident at Mill Park, in Melbourne's north on Friday.
Police allege the woman, identified as Momena Shoma, is a Bangladeshi national who travelled to Melbourne on February 1 on a student visa and was renting a room in the home of a man identified by neighbours as a 56-year-old nurse.
She was charged with one count of engaging in an act of terrorism and was remanded in custody. She did not make any application for bail.
Police were called to a home in Callistemon Rise about 4:20pm on Friday where they found the man with neck and shoulder injuries after being stabbed while he was asleep.



We are a nation in denial that we are “joined at the hip” to a dangerous ally. Apart from brief isolationist periods, the US has been almost perpetually at war; wars that we have often foolishly been drawn into. The US has subverted and overthrown numerous governments over two centuries. It has a military and business complex, almost a ‘hidden state’, that depends on war for influence and enrichment. It believes in its ‘manifest destiny’ which brings with it an assumed moral superiority which it denies to others. As the US goes into relative economic decline, it will be asking allies such as Australia for more help and support. We are running great risks in committing so much of our future to the US. We must build our security in our own region and not depend so exclusively on a foreign protector.