He wasn’t fat

Tragically, a 26 year old man, Lee Marriage, died within a couple of hundred metres of finishing last Sunday’s City2Surf fun-run.  He suffered a heart attack, and the medical staff couldn’t revive him.  Ever on the ball, the newspaper staff have had a geezer at his facebook page, where people have been writing tributes.  Someone who saw it commented (not clear whether in an interview or on Facebook): “He seemed fit, he wasn’t rippling with muscles but he had a slim build – he wasn’t fat.”

O Facebook, source of newspaper stories great and small!  Just before the Olympics, the Tele ran a frontpage story on a couple of our Olympic athletes who had updated their Facebook relationship status.

Are we so ignorant in our consciousness of health, so fixated upon obesity, that this becomes the sole indicator of whether or not we can complete a 14km run and be in tip-top shape?  (Are your muscles rippling?)   Are we so myopic in the face of the vast amounts of information about the world around us, that Facebook is the rule for what is newsworthy?  Can you dumb it down for me, just a little lower, pretty please?

It’s tragic that he died.  It scares me (does it scare you?).  I’m 27, I like to run.  I’ve done the City2Surf.  People in family have high-blood pressure, are obese.  I am not making light of his death.  Nor do I mean to have a go at whoever made those comments.  But, in the interest of public awareness, I’m sure journalists and editors can do a little better, have a little more judgement and responsibility, than Facebook and “he wasn’t fat”.

Filed under: Australia, death, food culture, madness, media, observations, personal, random thoughts, responsibility , City2Surf, death, dumbing it down, facebook, obesity, rant

Healing of the nation

A little while ago I wondered if you could put a nation ‘on the couch’, so to speak, to counsel it, in seeking healing for a violent past that still leaves its stain on today.  Perhaps today’s apology by the Australian federal parliament is a step towards such a process.

We the Parliament of Australia respectfully request that this apology be received in the spirit in which it is offered as part of the healing of the nation.

Filed under: Australia, colonialism, history, memory , Apology to the Stolen Generations, Australian history, Politics, psychoanalysis

Just this once, I promise

In Australia, it’s election time. Thankfully, this only runs for months, as opposed to the length of the US campaign trail. I’ve been trying to stay reasonably informed, while trying to avoid reading or watching newspapers and television news. It’s surprisingly difficult.

The newspapers – how can one help from noticing? – have been trumpeting the ‘me-tooism’ of Kevin Rudd and John Howard, as each steals or builds upon the others policies. So what? They’re campaigning for the same voters, aren’t they? What this should afford is some reflection on the make up of our ostensible national psyche. This ’sameness’ is – perhaps – a reflection of an intolerance for difference, a rejection of and refusal to engage in dialogue with marginal and migrant  communities, the accretion of a loudly wailing but small middle section of Australian societies conglomerated into a stultifying, atrophying homogeneity, wandering around in ever increasingly small circles in a daze of material wealth and spiritual lassitude. This ‘perhaps’, this possibility – that it could be considered, not that it necessarily is - should give us pause to think of how we ourselves may simply be demanding to be ’serviced’ by these politicians. If the campaign is boring, perhaps it is because we are. Where are our voices?

Two amusing and and promising points that this is not the case: Crikey founder, Stephen Mayne, is running against Federal Treasurer, Peter Costello in the seat of Higgins. What fun! He is collaborating with SA independent senate candidate and no-pokies campaigner, Nick Xenophon, and his website makes a nice reference to retiring maverick (well, this is the definition of independent, yes?) independent Peter Andren’s local news background – the Mayne Report.

The second point is – I live in Bennelong, Howard’s seat – the amusing local graffiti that appears. For several years we have had stencil paintings appearing on light poles, bridge pylons and substation boxes, picturing the children overboard, or David Hicks, or a somewhat dictator-like Howard proclaiming his ‘absolute power’ in the Senate. Now the pictures say ‘John’s Gone’, and, under a stencil of Peter Costello, ‘The Booby Prize’. I’ve also seen locals with bumper stickers saying ‘heat’s on, John’, and residents also distributing those oh-so fashionable rubber wristbands, saying ‘Dump Howard’. Whether or not you agree with the to-the-man tactics and message, they are, nevertheless, promising signs of life.

Filed under: Australia, Politics, madness, media