These days nobody wants to be near anyone who they hate, fear, and /or don't understand. We don't like to be in situations that force us to endure the uncomfortable.
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The result of this can be seen everywhere:
- we lock away perfectly legitimate seekers of asylum so that people stuck in the "football, meat pies, kangaroos and Holden cars" concept of 'being Australian' don't have to cope with people of a different skin colour or way of life,
- we pay tens of thousands to private educational institutions to make sue our children mix with only the type of children we want them to, despite recent research over 30 years to show that educationally there is no benefit,
- we protect the integration of public housing in areas where it will lower the realestate value of our own slice of Australia, and the list goes on.
None of us enjoys being out of our comfort zone, I know this, but we have just celebrated what certainly must have been the greatest culture shock of all to any Australian, the experiences of ANZAC troops in the First World War.
'Glorious defeat' as our 'revered' Prime Minister repeatedly called it in speeches in Turkey over the weekend, was actually triumph of the human spirit under appalling conditions. As we stood in the light sprinkle of rain at the Yass commemoration it occurred to me that the average soldier underling the heat, cold, mud and blood of Gallipoli would have given anything to be standing where we were on Saturday morning, despite the rain.
The amazing outcome of all that bloodshed was not an eternal hatred of the Turk with his darker complexion , foreign religion and customs, but an enduring respect that evolved even as the men of both sides did the murderous bidding of their political masters.
Where is that capacity to respect and accommodate and prevail over the different, the threatening and the scary, that our ANZAC forebears had?
The world is changing rapidly, borders are more fluid and trouble and strife cause decent people to flee their once safe homes and seek asylum. Our society cannot flourish if fear prevents us from fulfilling the promise of the oft forgotten second verse of our national anthem, "..... We've boundless plains to share".
