verging_on_random

The hidden casualties

November 5, 2006 on 9:42 am | In Uncategorized |

One of my favourite newspaper features is ‘Two of Us’ in the Sydney Morning Herald’s ‘Good Weekend’ supplement. Other people must like it too; it’s now also a show on SBS.

‘Two of Us’ describes its subjects in a completely non-judgemental fashion. It reminds readers that many Australians don’t conform to the ‘battlers/middle Australia’ stereotypes that our political leaders parrot endlessly in their propaganda. It forces readers to confront the reality that many Australians aren’t coping terribly well with contemporary society. Not everyone is busily accumulating wealth, or trying to. The biggest concern in many people’s lives is not the prospect of another rise in interest rates - it’s the fact that they are personally unhappy. Unhappy because they feel little control over their own lives, their relationships with society are dysfunctional and they have no hope for the future.

Not all the people featured in ‘Two of Us’ are like that of course. Many are cheerful, positive individuals who’ve found individual contentment despite not fitting into societal norms. But today’s featured pair are especially poignant reminders of the hidden casualties of our individualistic, materialistic society.

Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be an online version of the story, although there’s an earlier news story about them here. I can’t say that I feel the slightest warmth towards these women and I’d go to considerable lengths to avoid having to spend any time with them, which probably says more about my capacity for compassion than it does about them. But their story does make me extremely sad. And angry in a vague way, not at them, but because I know many people whose reaction to the story would be to label the women freaks who had somehow brought all their problems on themselves.

I see a lot of unhappy people where I live now. My closest neighbour is a single mum with two pre-school kids. Most of her day consists of her screaming at them and vice versa. Other neighbours alternate between sitting slumped in front of the TV and having interminable conversations with each other in which they vie to see who can express the most virulent hatred of the world they live in. You can almost see the venom spreading around them like a cloud as their faces get redder and more contorted. Still others drift apathetically from one welfare payment to the next: one day of living like a millionaire and 13 days of dodging debt-collectors and begging for charity. These people abandoned conventional concepts of dignity and self-respect a long time ago.

None of our political leaders seems concerned about people like these any more. I doubt that many of them are even conscious of their existence, except in a nebulous ‘Oh sure, we must have a safety net for the genuinely disadvantaged’ kind of way. The trouble is these people aren’t disadvantaged in any way that you can put your finger on. They’re not ill (well except maybe for the women in ‘Two of Us’), or disabled. They just can’t find a role in contemporary Australia that offers them any kind of good life, in either their own estimation or that of others.

That’s the hidden tragedy of this country and one that a Labor government would do nothing to resolve. Kim Beazley touting his ‘compact with middle Australia’ might be good politics because it’s a waste of time targeting ‘upper Australia’. But what about the bottom Kim? Who’s going to look out for them?

Welcome to social Darwinism. The survival of the fittest, 21st century style.