A diet of just the bad stuff is killing our kids

Perhaps it's true that an over zealous parent is better than an indifferent one. It doesn't have to be either extreme. It seems the days of playing with your friends until dusk is no longer ok. Home base needs to know where you are at all times.

For many kids, apart from school, their only grasp on reality comes from news and social media. It's the national conversation that permeates our lives.

If they look back on our past either at school or through our national conversation they might be laden with guilt. They're told they're living in a stolen country. They're reminded of appalling treatment dished out by some colonialists to Indigenous Australians. For good measure they're reminded what a shocking lot of slave trading colonialists the British were. There's certainly some truth there but it's not the whole truth.

London to a brick they don't learn anything of the complicated story of slavery. Vikings were great slave traders. There surely isn't much focus on the Africans who enslaved other Africans, or who traded in them. The poor old Brits probably get a good walloping with less mention of the Portuguese, the French and the Dutch. Slavery was abhorrent. It still exists today with a different face. People are conned into coming here for work, their passports taken on arrival and if they get paid it's very little. The point is, why make all our kids feel as though the only history they have is a bad one. I wonder how much of a run the British anti-slave traders get in schools.

Many years ago one my sisters was asked to drop by and talk to the teacher. She thought "Oh Oh". All my family had been up to one family member's place in western New South Wales for Easter. My nephew's account of this weekend included the comment that we had boiled a pig alive and eaten it. What in fact had happened was that said big black feral pig (named Idi Amin), raised from a piglet, had been dispatched with a minimum of fuss. His head in the bucket to gobble up the soaked corn distracted him as the rifle nose went right up to his cranium. He wouldn't have even heard the trigger click. The kids just didn't notice. He then went in a tub of boiling water to loosen the hairs which were then scraped off, badly. Into the meat house and Easter Sunday a leg or two on the table.

My nephew had told the story as he saw it. The teacher was appalled. The whole truth was a different story.

Everyone who has contributed to the Australia we live in has much to be proud of. Of course there has to be truth telling, but let it be the whole truth not just the bad stuff.

If we consider what the younger generation have to look forward to that's pretty bleak as well. We hear so many prophecies about the end of the world that it's a wonder kids think much at all about a brave new world of which they might be a part. They must wonder if the world will be burnt to a crisp before they reach adulthood. Equally they must feel as though they are the progeny of mindless idiots who are killing off all our native flora and fauna and bringing the world to a fiery end.

READ MORE:

A few basic facts elude many. Our emissions nationally don't add up to much on the global scale. It's China and India that are pouring emissions out with no real sign of stopping . That's certainly not to say we should do nothing. Not at all. It is to say that whatever we do on our own will make very little difference. It's the big emitters who need to wind back ... otherwise nothing much happens.

The challenge is not primarily what we do as it is how we get China and India to play ball. If we want Co2 emissions to fall globally the world has to act. I would add in a way proportionate to the damage now being done.

To hear people talk about a climate crisis as the reason we have to act in Australia infers to young people that if we do what we can it will all be OK. The reality is that we have to act to demonstrate commitment but nothing we do alone is going to change anything.

To achieve global change we have to get the big emitters to change. Setting an example is a great demonstration of bona fides, but it doesn't make them move.

Kids shouldn't be thinking "Unless we, Australia, do XYZ the world will burn to a crisp". They shouldn't be made to feel as though we are the bad guys.

There may be many options that could come under the "do XYZ" banner but the protagonists of one or another are never keen to admit that. Calm and reasoned debate has just gone out the window on all sides.

I often think of that Idi Amin weekend. The whole truth does have an uglyish part - the circle of life is brutal. But the whole truth of Idi's demise is a much kinder and gentler story than the teacher heard. A diet of just the bad stuff is killing our kids.