Just a few more sleeps before NSW knows who will form the next State Government.
You may have followed what passed for the election campaign, unless you had more interesting stuff to do, like pick at scabs, or prepare for a colonoscopy.
If you were desperate enough to keep an eye on the news, you’ll have seen that, as usual, neither side covered itself in glory.
Gladys Berejiklian and her cast of black holes continued to extol the virtues of her decision to demolish existing sports stadiums (to be rebuilt at vast expense) while desperate old people wait two years for knee replacements and other basic surgeries.
I have no doubt that someone has calculated every adult male in NSW could get three happy endings a week, every female could get a new pair of shoes AND every school kid could get a new iPhone for the money being pissed away into more sports facilities.
The Labor leader – Michael something – managed to step into a pile of his own well-matured doodoo in the final week of the campaign when the media uncovered a crass and abysmally stupid comment he made while meeting potential voters last year in a Blue Mountains pub.
They must have been well into the grog, because Michael Something responded to a question about youth unemployment by whingeing that “the bloody Asians are taking our jobs”.
Of course, he did NOT say bloody Asians, and he didn’t say (well, not exactly) that they’re stealing the bread from our kiddies’ mouths – but that’s how it has been heard and interpreted by everyone looking for an excuse NOT to vote for Labor this time round.
In effect, in the week that a mad, evil racist under-achieving tosser massacred 50 innocent people in New Zealand, just because they were different from him, Michael bloody Daley was shown to have been differentiating between what he seemed to perceive as hard-done-by nice Aussie kids and opportunistic, grasping nasty immigrant or second generation Aussie kids.
Just how many excuses does anyone need to duck on voting for any of these useless wankers? Not many, as you well know.
It’s a miracle that anyone, apart from the extremist ratbags who’re so obsessed with the colour of their own excrement that they’d vote for a breeding program involving Fraser Anning, Cory Bernardi, Pauline Hanson, Michaelia Cash and Paul Dutton — bothers to turn out for elections.
As for New Zealand: There is no way any person with a skerrick of decency in their souls could possibly find anything good, worthy, amusing or justifiable about what a deluded obsessive jerk did there.
The blood was still seeping from the dead and dying when the New Zealand PM, Jacinta Ardern, pleaded with the news media to behave sensitively and responsibly by NOT broadcasting any of the footage filmed by the killer as he carried out his disgusting and cowardly act.
Most media did as asked. But not Murdoch’s Sky News Australia (and some other outlets in other countries).
Some politicians — most notably Fraser “19-votes” Anning – used the occasion to spread their particular brand of racist and separatist shite, giving comfort to the deranged extreme right-wingers who cling to discredited and destructive myths about the superiority of one race. (If you were ever to read some of the illogical filth written and distributed by those people you’d realise their average IQ alone disproves any claims of superiority.)
Decent people around the world, the majority of Christians, Muslims and Jews – and the vast number who do NOT cleave to any particular monotheistic mythology – have denounced and will continue to denounce terrorist violence, be it perpetrated by white, Christian right-wingers, brown Islamic extremists who use a few paragraphs from a 1400-year-old scripture, or simply by political obsessives* of all shades.
(*Overnight, the demagogic leader of Turkey, Recep Erdogan, jumped onto the Christchurch massacre, railing against Australian and Kiwi visitors to his country, whipping his blinkered followers into a frenzy to boost his election campaign. He reminded me of nothing so much as Donald Trump railing against all Muslim immigration and tourism while whipping his own blinkered followers into a lather.)
Guns and bloodshed, hate speech and bigotry, none of that will improve our world. Tolerance, understanding and patience will. And, maybe, a few more hundred years of developing human civilisation, if we don’t all obliterate ourselves first, deliberately or through idiocy and neglect.
Before you mouth off about Blacks, Browns, Yellows, Muslims, Jews, Hindus and Jains, remember that most of last century’s worst massacres were conducted by white politicians like Hitler, Stalin, Milosevic, Mladic, Verwoerd, etc.
Civilisation is not about how white you are, or how Christian you are. It is about how we empathise, how well we play with others, and how well we treat those in need.
When we see others fail to rise to that standard, we should try to lift them, rather than stoop to a lower level.