Apart from the disingenuous ‘faith’ being exhibited by many who are not normally Catholic, I have to say I have been deeply trouble by the hype surround her canonisation. This is because nationalism has reared its ugly head again. As with the Commonwealth Games, we once again as a nation have resorted to mass flag waving and self-congratulating as part of the ‘celebrations’.

That every major news outlet has covered the event with references such as ‘Our Mary, ‘Australia’s first saint” and so on  bothers me. Firstly, it’s blatant hypocrisy from outlets that would normally spend their time attacking the Catholic church (most notably over sexual abuse allegations) and Christians in general. For them to then turn around and celebrate the canonisation the way they are is hypocritical to say the least. More worrying however, is the way they have divorced Mary from Catholicism.

It’s almost as though she wasn’t a nun but just your typical ‘Aussie’. She is lauded like a gold-medal athlete in a way that is sickening. I hardly think she would appreciate being used as a standard bearer for 21st ‘Aussie’ values.

The images of Australian ‘pilgrims’ waving flags at her canonisation is troubling also. What is an important religious ceremony for Catholics is turned into some kind of great national achievement in doing so. She becomes another aussie who bested the world. Yet nuns are hardly well-respected, or even often talked about, members of our society. In fact I am certain Mary’s views would be greatly at odds with mainstream Australia.

Mary was by all accounts a good woman. And while I am personally not Catholic I believe she did achieve some great things in her work with the poor and disadvantaged and not least of all the way she stood up to sexual abuse. However, she in no way epitomises Australia. She is an example of an amazing woman and for Catholics she is now a Saint. That she is Australian is almost irrelevant.

Certainly secular media whipping up a nationalistic frenzy to improve ratings is not welcome, nor are politicians jumping on the bandwagon in the hope of gaining votes. If the government thought so highly of Mary surely they would have awarded her some kind of posthumous award for her humanitarian work? As it stands I find a self-proclaimed atheist, that is Julia Gillard, telling us all how wonderful her canonisation a little bit odd.

More than anything though, the smell of nationalism in the air is always of concern.

And let’s not equivocate on this point; bias in journalism is a bad thing. The opinion pages should provide a range of different views and the news pages should be free from opinion and stick to the facts. While this won’t remove all bias, we’re all aware of how omissions and editorial choices affect bias; it will go some way toward limiting its impact.

However, there is- I’d say recently but I suspect it is in no way a new trend so let’s say it’s something I’ve noticed lately- a view in journalism that being unbiased means not presenting the facts. What I mean by this is that journalists, in an effort to avoid bias, present in news pieces only the views and arguments of the main players involved and give equal space to both. What’s wrong with that you ask? Well the answer to that is simple.

Quite often all sides of a story are lying or at least actively distorting the truth.

If the fourth estate takes seriously its job within our democracy so called to hold to account the government, big business etc. Then it needs to hold them to the truth. It is not biased to correct the facts. When a politician argues a point by either misrepresenting or outright denying/changing the facts then the journalist must correct this; regardless of whether or not the opposing side of politics does.

I’ll give an example. When the opposition is out saying we are being swamped by boat people this is a clear misrepresentation of the facts.

In a news report it is not the journalist’s job to provide commentary on the opposition’s immigration policy. It is the journalist’s duty to run the quote from the opposition spokesman saying, “Australia is being flooded by boats.” However, nest to this quote we should read that actually boat people make up only 1% of total immigration and that the majority of illegal immigrants are people who arrive on planes and overstay their visas (many of whom come from the UK).

This is irrefutable truth substantiated by independent bodies. Without such a qualification, readers may believe we are actually being flooded by boat people. They may even connect this idea to population growth trends. With the correction readers can understand more accurately what the opposition spokesman means by ‘flood’.

And before you accuse me of left leaning I assure you the same level of scrutiny should be levelled at the Government.

Whenever a politician distorts the facts the facts should be printed in the same article. This is the job of the fourth estate. This is scrutiny.

It is not a matter of opinion to point out that a politician has the facts wrong. Or that a policy will effect have ‘x’ effect when this can be proved empirically. Nor is this bias.

Bias would be to call the opposition’s immigration policy racist. When the facts, and all the facts, are reported then the public can make an informed decision. When only spin and distorted facts are reported then this isn’t possible.

Bias should be fought in the media, but never at the expense of the truth.

Or 134,416,078 a year.

Unfortunately you’re feeling thirsty so you start to drink. By the time your food arrives you’ve pretty well finished, and then the waiter/waitress asks,
“Can I get you some more drinks”.

It’s a scam. It’s a horrible scam to make you spend more money. Why, why can’t they bring your drink with your food and give you water in the meantime? It wouldn’t be hard and then my drink could accent my meal like I planned.

Until such a time I’ll just have to be satisfied answering the waiter/waitress’ question with a polite but curt, “I think we’re fine, thanks.”

This is a problem I think we face too and as much as I think there are serious question marks around the Tea Part Movement (the involvement of Fox News, it’s racial attitudes etc.) on this one issue I believe they really do have a point. Across the western world we have become obsessed with cities in the past century or so. That’s no to say that cities are new, but they are increasingly becoming the population base for our countries.

According to the ABS as of 2006 more than two thirds of our population (68.4%) lived in cities and this trend toward cities is only expected to continue. This of itself is not necessarily an issue but coupled with this movement is a growing disregard or even snobbery directed toward those who still live in regional areas. As evidence of this one only needs to think of the lampooning of Bob Katter in the media (and even by myself), purely because the man does not conform to ‘city’ standards of behaviour many have written him off as being backward and stupid. This in spite of the fact that when he appears on programmes such as Q & A he is able to quote political theorists whose names I’m sure most members of parliament can’t even spell (de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill). He may be a Mad Hatter but he is extremely well read.

The point is there is certainly an inner-city elitism forming in this nation. There is also an intellectual superiority being formed. Why is it that on any major issue we always need “expert” opinions and why is it we assume these opinions are always valid. Opinions coming from people who have spent most of their adult lives in city universities won’t necessarily capture the interests of the entire nation.

Then there’s the outrage that many feel at the three bush independents seeking a rural package. At what point did it becoming acceptable for millions of dollars to be spent in marginal city electorates but not elsewhere?

The Tea Party Movement has been successful because it’s not all wrong. There is an element of truth to their arguments. To avoid our own tea party movement we need politicians who listen to more voices and start considering the strain the cities are putting on the nation as a whole. Bob Katter claiming that rural Australia is closing down isn’t just some bush hick decrying a by-gone era of rural Australia. His point is real and valid and has ramifications for more people than just a bunch of farmers in Northern Queensland.

Perhaps we should stop listening to the inner-city economists who say free trade is always good and start asking, “good for who?”

Then again as the population base moves to the city so does the voter base, and that’s the real problem. That’s why it took a hung parliament to put these issues on the map. As for the private sector, well the consumer base is in the cities as well. So maybe we need our own tea party movement but instead of it being a call to yesterday in need to be call to tomorrow; a more sustainable future where we throw aside the economic rationalism of the past and start considering the people of this nation. A call to a government that isn’t about improving our ‘economy’ at all costs but is instead about governing justly for all.

And lastly, perhaps we need to reconsider our own prejudices.

I was in Sydney in 2000. When the Olympics happened I was nine, although at the time I probably would’ve said nine and a half, or even nearly ten. I can’t say I actually went to any events but I remember the buzz. I remember watching the opening ceremony on TV and I remember being spoon-fed copious doses of the “Olympic spirit’ daily at school.

Even then I felt I was being slightly brainwashed. It just didn’t seem quite right. We were taught endlessly about the Olympic movement and its origins in Ancient Greece, but to me it felt odd to believe that a sporting event was that powerful. The way it was taught in school you’d be forgiven for thinking it was the solution to world peace- never mind Munich. What was scary is the way everyone seemed to believe.

Scarier is the way we still do.

I’ve heard people talk of an international age of innocence. In this context Sydney 2000 is seen as the apex of that era. There was the huge New Years Eve celebrations, capped off by “the best games ever”. People talk as though we were all naïve then, pure until suddenly, almost exactly a year later, the world came crashing to a halt when two buildings fell to the ground.

Such an impression 9/11 has made on the contemporary psyche.

It’s talked about as though it was a great turning point in history. A grand moment when for the first time we all woke up and no longer believed in childish notions like peace, security and Santa.

9/11 was a terrible event, a shocking moment of brutality that should be remembered. The Sydney 2000 Olympics was a highly successful sporting and cultural event. But when we try and turn them into something bigger we are simply falsifying history. We’re perpetuating our own myth, and it’s a foolish one.

Evil did not begin with 9/11, and we were not innocent in the year 2000.

In the year 2000 there were conflicts in: (click here for more detail)

• Algeria
• Anglola
• Burma
• China
• Colombia
• The Congo
• Georgia
• India
• Israel
• Korea
• Laos
• Namibia
• Nepal
• Nigeria
• Peru
• The Philippines
• Russia
• Somalia
• Spain
• Turkey

Nor can we say that perhaps it was only the Western world that was innocent. The west has had blood on its hands for decades.

The Olympic games itself is no stranger to terrorism, who could forget Munich? This myth of September 11 seems to want us to forget history. We are asked to believe that the two towers falling was the first act of evil to threaten us. This is a lie.

September 11 was a terrible tragedy and should be remembered but if it is to be remembered as a turning point it needs to be for the right reasons. Perhaps it was a turning point in American mid-east policy, or a turning point for domestic security legislation. The myth of September 11 has allowed governments to claim a mandate to do things that would otherwise be considered unthinkable.

Anti-terrorism laws are slowly clawing at individual freedoms and this is a danger. The world was no less safe on September 11 than it was on September 10.

Nor were we more innocent in Sydney 2000. Any retrospective of Sydney 2000 should remind of us a great Olympics and a showcase of Sydney as an international city. It should not mythologise the past, 2000 was no golden era. The world was much the same then as it is now. Sydney itself hasn’t undergone some kind of personality transplant since then.

Sydney is changing. Nothing is static. But to say that we have gotten better or worse, well that’s a question for the history books and not one we can answer just yet.

42 million displaced people

including 16 million refugees

and 26 million internally displaced people.

Source: UNHCR

That’s right. I said it. To say that Education will fix all of society’s problems means ignoring one’s own education. I came across this old chestnut while reading The Drum on the ABC website. While not explicitly stated, the idea is key to the article and one commenter went as far as to say “education may even eradicate racism”. I don’t disagree with the main point, racism is stupid, however, to say that ‘racists‘ are stupid or lack education, well that’s another thing entirely.

People who say that education will solve all of society’s problems, which in the case of the Drum article is racism, have a knack of ignoring history and even the world around them.

Last time I checked it was un-educated people were not responsible for all the wrongs in the world. In fact they’re not even responsible for the worst of them.

To start with the worst we’ll go to Hitler. He may have been many things but he was not un-educated. He was even a gifted orator and his book Mein Kampf was very popular. Ok. So Hitler may have been educated and still bad but you can’t account for the odd anomaly. Can’t I?

Let’s move away from extreme examples and look closer to home. Tony Abbott is a Rhodes Scholar yet he spouts that “stop the boats” rubbish (see statistics). The Atom Bomb was made and used by some very clever people. Kim Jong-Il over in North Korea may be a head case but he’s not exactly what I’d call uneducated. Large companies that exploit people are run by educated types. Those who suppressed the information that tobacco is bad for you were educated. In fact anyone involved in any kind of misinformation or propaganda campaign requires some form of eduction.

Education doesn’t solve all our problems. Don’t get me wrong it’s a great thing but it won’t fix society. Education just teaches those who would do bad things, or spout racist ideas or do otherwise dodgy stuff, how to do it better and on a much grander scale.

Education may be a good thing. But if there was no education machine guns never would’ve been invented, nor nuclear weapons, or biological weapons.

By all means we should have education but the solution to our problems goes to something deeper. It goes to the question of what is the human condition? Why are we the way we are? Are we good or evil? What is good and what is evil?

Education may be important as a tool to help us answer these questions but only if we remember history. And history teaches us that smart people do bad things.

For whatever reason we all stood still to watch Two Towers fall down, and then we were afraid. Why I’m not so sure. Worse things have happened in this century, even before then. And worse things certainly happened in the one that had only just concluded. As for terrorism, well it wasn’t a new invention. Just ask people who lived in London or Chechnya. Even terrorism in the United States wasn’t exactly new.

Maybe it was the scale of it. Or maybe we’d just all started to believe the myth.

The wall had come down. The cold war had ended. We’d long left Vietnam and Korea and World War III was a conspiracy theory at best. Suddenly we believed in peace. Who knows maybe even the UN was working.

And suddenly the world was on fire. Or so it seemed.

Those Two Towers fell and so did the western world’s morale. It’s belief in safety, security and it’s own strength.

All of these things need to be considered in greater depth and by more people than they have. But from that gruesome attack came something uglier even than the nearly 3000 deaths. From those attacks came hatred.

It was a hatred born of fear. And so we retaliated. And what began as one barbaric act became a cycle. Vengeance was swift and harsh and now seemingly endless.

We’re still in Iraq and Afghanistan and people are starting to really ask why?

Then there’s the American minister threatening to burn Korans.

And the threats of retaliation if he does

And the mosque to be built near ‘ground zero’.

Or the growing number of people who think that President Barack Obama is a Muslim.

More than anything there is fear and hatred and distrust.

The cold war seems simple now, communists bad, west good. But this ‘new paradigm’ as we so often call it, well it’s much harder. There’s no flags, no declarations of war. Even ideology seems harder to pin down with so many fractured groups. Even the west is divided on what to do and who to do it to. Humour doesn’t even seem safe anymore. As a friend pointed out “at least if you insult a Christian they won’t blow you up.”

With another September 11 just gone it’s clear society is divided. It’s racial, often bigoted and ill informed and it’s ugly. But beneath the rhetoric is the fear of the shadow of a plane in clear September sky, and it’s fear that is very difficult to erase.

children born in Australia

will be dead by age 5.

Source: UNICEF