This is just plain sad.
An Australia Day racist attack on Australia and Australians delivered to you fresh and clean by New Matilda on Australia Day. An attack on all Australians, no matter their colour or "race" . I would reckon this writer has been nursing this little article for some time.
How very sad.
The blog's response is below. I could have added that no one is responsible for crimes committed before they were born. You are responsible only for what you do in your own life. It is astonishing and disturbing that this needs to be said at this point in the advance of humankind.
What is going wrong?
Out in the park there is an unscooped dog poo with a tiny Australian flag toothpicked into it. This delicately placed little ensign has given me nationalist yearnings on this, Australia Day. ‘That’s the spirit’, I find myself thinking.
I am bracing for another day of fatuous flag waving by white Australians on Australia Day. In years past, Australian flag wavers have all been white people. Every. Last. One I Saw. The media was, of course, at pains to show Australians of non-Anglo descent under the Cronulla Cape. They embodied Multiculturalism, and shrinking parts of our media still make an effort at being inclusive. Good try.
But it wasn’t representative.
Last year I took a broad survey looking behind the windscreens of every flag-bearing hearse, I mean car, from here to Angelsea, noting all the beach flag paraphernalia on the way. How well our navy blue goes with alabaster, freckled and scorched complexions.
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Posted Wednesday, January 28, 2015 - 02:08
This flag waving thing is a recent development. There was none of this, or the boozing, forty years ago. I don't get out much I guess but I didn't even notice this phenomenon until a few years ago.
Around here, there were no yobbos in sight. Heaps of Aussie flags everywhere and the parks full of families having BBQ's and picnics. I did not notice what colour or race they were but I'm pretty certain they were the usual mix. The indigenous Australian lady who has been a carer for one of my frail and elderly parents for some years did not seem to wince too much when he wished her a happy Australia Day.
Having said this I have to say this piece disturbs me deeply for a number of reasons, the first of which is that it is racist. I'm a white Australian. No one would pick me on sight as any different at all from any other white Australian. A bit better looking I guess but that is about the sum of it. Yet I don't need to hear any stories about massacres, genocide and second or third class citizenship from anybody, no matter who they are, to know what we are talking about.
There is a real danger in dwelling in and reliving the horrors of the past. You must put that in its own compartment for your own sake but just as important as that you have a duty to not give the arseholes a posthumous victory. Nor their present day successors. The best revenge is to rise above them.
Do not defame Australia. That is sad and wrong. None of us has any responsibility for the circumstances of our birth and to attribute any to some one else on that count alone is just plain disgusting no matter who you are talking about.
When you talk about Australia look at how it is today. It is idiotic and defamatory to transplant the past on to the here and now no matter how much you might dislike the boozy yobbos and flag waving parties.
Worse even than that, it is highly offensive to other Australians, including me, who are from families that for certain haven't been around as long as yours, but who have been through the grinder a few times in defence of the place over quite a few generations from the Western Front to the Burma Railway.
I say again, no one is responsible for the circumstances of their birth. But I can tell you something true for nothing. The world is stuffed to the jawbone with places a damn sight worse than Australia to have been born for those of us who have had that enormous and completely undeserved good fortune.
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