There is no place for silence
Today, I write from the esplanade in Cairns, Far North Queensland, where we are spending a few early morning hours before our final flight home.
There are trees along the streets, trash on the ground, and people walk across the pedestrian crossing when the light is red. It is nearly 30C and it is not yet 8 AM.
I wonder at the disintegration of Western Culture into a hard binary that has friends stop talking to each other, and families torn apart. I am reading Naomi Klein’s important book about this topic, Doppelgänger – a trip into the mirror world. Her Doppelgänger, Naomi Wolf, once revered for her feminist stand, has become the voice of fear, propaganda, and ridiculous conspiracy theories that are the true virus of COVID years.
Naomi Klein points out the many times people like us, who care about all-human flourishing, have remained silent when we needed to speak up.
Into that vacuum stepped arbiters of opportunity, the Steve Bannon’s and the Naomi Wolf’s of the world, filling the void with a path of recognition and acceptance for those who have felt alienated in their own world – all based on half-truths and obfuscation – highly strategically structured to capture minds.
I compare this to Japanese culture. Harmony, order and self-development. There is a cohesion that allows for the nuance. History that goes back thousands of years. An ill-gotten attempt at Imperialism and an extremely harsh recession that brought the country to its knees.
In Australia, we have an opposition that has seized the codes from the likes of Bannon and Trump, thriving off fear and lies, directing attention away from what needs to be attended to towards some minor drama.
We have to wise up, speak up, take a stand.
There is no place for silence in today’s world. Every voice toward truth and all-human dignity matters.
Photo Taken November 20th 2023
