The greater triumphs and achievements

Today in 3QuarksDaily Abbas Raza quotes Nehru:

“   We end today a period of ill fortune and India discovers herself again. The achievement we celebrate today is but a step, an opening of opportunity, to the greater triumphs and achievements that await us.

Are we brave enough and wise enough to grasp this opportunity and accept the challenge of the future?

This is precisely the opportunity, we thought, that Australia faces right now and seems, world-wearily, to be about to decline.

Thirty-five years ago Australians were excited at the prospect of throwing off the shackles of 25 years of boring, po-faced, arrogantly self-righteous, calvinoid/augustinoid coalition rule. And how we did throw them off!

Australia experienced a cultural excitement and energy and a social flowering unseen in decades. If ever. And brief though it was it changed our social landscape and our cultural and creative self-confidence for decades to come.

It took a man who was a visionary – an arrogant visionary, for sure (a justifiably arrogant visionary, perhaps) – with almost unlimited willingness to nurture his vision, to release us from the shackles of a most unpopular war and to have the confidence in Australians to encourage us to be ourselves, and to grow into whoever we would turn out to be.

And then before too long the lights dimmed.

The grey sludge of coalition rule crept up over our boots and then our hearts and we were once again forced by lies into the ugly, unpopular, insane, illegal horror of another war we didn’t want and didn’t understand.

And we have once again learnt obediently

to trudge daily to the foundry to collect our stale daily crumbs,

knowing that it is more than we deserve,

tugging our forelocks at the mill owners who have never had it so good,

being pathetically grateful for our good fortune,

and being expected to vote loyally yet again for our masters and betters

and the yoke of an only-mildly-despotic regime.

So now here we are again, just as we were in ’72 with the opportunity to overthrow the tyrants, to end our part in a horrible war and to flourish enthusiastically again as a nation of creators and experimenters and revellers in Life.

And we know, or we feel in our bones, that it is about to happen.

But where is the excitement?

Where is our sense of “the greater triumphs and achievements that await us”? What has happened to our courage and wisdom “to grasp this opportunity and accept the challenge of the future”?

There is none.

We are resigned.

We have on the one side the hand of living death and on the other a candidate who promises to be no different.

There is no vision, no promise.

No brave new morality,

no freshly-polished values,

no curtains opened to let the sunshine into our souls,

no outraged insistence on our birthright as free, imaginative and resourceful Australians.

Just more of the boring, left-brain, repetitive, cardiganed, conventional, calvinistic, po-faced, minutely-regulated, micro-managed, soup-kitchen-slop, soul-destroying same.

Two leaders: both of whom will send you into an instant coma, if they breathe on you,.

We do not deserve such alternatives.

We are better than that.

We ought not accept such a choice.

We are better than both of them.