Greed is not Goode

A final word on the Goodes saga…

Two years back I sort of guessed this thing would blow up eventually, especially after they made him Australian of the year.

The whole saga is quickly polarising Australians into two camps;

1. Those who defend the right for crowds to boo Adam Goodes for any number of reasons. Not one of these folks is saying they are booing him for racist reasons – in fact that they are making any number of excuses, just not racism. Oddly though, not one of these folks will admit the possibility even one of the people booing, amongst the many thousands, could even be racially motivated.

2. The rest who are appalled by the whole thing.

There is another dimension to this problem and that is one of the hatred of the nanny state. Many of the people who support the right for crowds to boo Adam Goodes are using their hatred of the nanny state as their excuse.

Would that they choose another issue to vent their spleen on…

What they don’t seem to realise is that Australia’s completely unsorted and shameful relationship with its indigenous people is a boil the size the whole body.

It just so happens that many of the people that hate the nanny state also hate the idea of genuine reparations to the indigenous people of this country.

They fear that the nanny state and associated politically correct policies will lead us down a rabbit hole where they may actually be financially affected by whatever the reparations end up being.

My guess is somewhere in the back of their minds they know that by any rational assessment they are guilty of enjoying the proceeds of Australia’s horrific treatment of its indigenous people over the last 200 odd years.

‘It wasn’t us’ they say, ‘It all happened before we were born.’ Or ‘we just got here 20 years ago’.

This is what could only be called a very convenient untruth.

So when you boil it all down this whole race issue in Australia is mainly down to greed.

The number of genuinely insane emotionally-motivated racists is probably quite small.

All I can say is the longer we wait to deal with this issue the bigger the boil will get.

If we wait too long the bloody thing will kill us.

The really difficult question I have is how we get this reality into the minds of all those first order greedy nay-sayers?

Forcing them to come along with whatever the resolution package we concoct without consent won’t really cut it, especially if they represent a good portion of the population (as they seem to do).

After all, in all other matters of our consumerism existence we do seem to promote a ‘greed is good’ culture.

I have this very uncomfortable feeling that using the socio-political machine to force a resolution might just be counter productive.

All I can hope for is that this current crisis (because that is what it is becoming) might create enough noise for a path forward to be identified.

The darkest hour is often followed by the chink of dawn.