When ignorance is not an option

As musician Fred Leone joins the list of those caught in the crosshairs for daring to criticise Israel's actions in Gaza and Trump continues his daily announcements, each more terrifying than the last, Rosemary Sorensen asks if it is better to be ignorant of the chaos.

IT'S NOT all doom and gloom.

Well, actually, it is but as the good and smart, and worried people keep telling us, losing hope is not an option.

At the local supermarket, a couple of women chat next to the avocados, saying things like: I don’t want to hear the T word again today, I tell my husband, nope, just leave it alone. Don’t want to hear what he’s done now, I’m fed up with the awful news out of America, (still talking about it as they move on to the bananas).

Later that week, I’m dropping in to the Eucalyptus Distillery Museum (why? Read on…) and chatting to the volunteer keeping the place open that day, when in come a couple of New Zealand tourists. They’d seen the sign off the main road that runs between Wedderburn and Inglewood in Loddon Shire, Central Victoria, thought, Why not? Let’s take a look and pulled off into the dusty carpark.

Chatting, as people do in such places when they’ve got the time to dally, I learnt that the man used to be employed by the NZ government as a clown (and while this piece of information rendered me speechless for a moment, I did not, you’ll be pleased to know, counter with a smart-arse question, such as Which department?).

These retirees from New Zealand were meandering around the countryside, from Adelaide eastwards, stopping when the mood took them or a sign beckoned. Good way to take a break from the endless awful news of the day, I said. I gave up reading the news years ago, the former clown said.

Creative Australia's shameful dumping of Khaled Sabsabi

If Creative Australia thinks it's reducing the risk of losing public support by cancelling Khaled Sabsasi, surely the question is, who is this “public” it is worrying about?

Is this a good call? If you can’t do anything to help, say, those who are appalled by the Victorian Government’s reversal of their previous reduction in the duck-killing season. Or, say, the Lebanese-Australian artist dumped unceremoniously by Creative Australia because of how “the public” might react to his art, then maybe not knowing and therefore, through ignorance, not caring, is the best option?

It’s not, of course — and I could quote pages and pages of Martin Hagglund’s marvellous This Life to suggest that, not knowing is not an option because:

'Being vulnerable to pain, loss and death [and, for our purposes here, to the knowledge of injustice, inequality and cruelty] is not a fallen condition but inseparable from being someone for whom something can matter.'

This Danish-American philosopher says 'We must be vulnerable', because only then can we be aware of the urgency of changing our lives for the better:

We are reconciled with being alive, but for that very reason we are not reconciled to living unworthy lives. We demand a better society and we know that it depends on us.

In taking action we are not waiting for a timeless future but grasp in practice that our time is all we have.

Trump 2.0 and what it means Down Under

What will happen to Australia once the superpower we have followed into endless battles, the United States, finally unravels?

All very well if you’ve got a beautiful mind like Hagglund. But even for my lazier and slower mind, it’s this notion of a well-spent life, a worthwhile life, a life that matters, that niggles against the turn-away option.

My NZ clown friend was being sensibly defeatist when he ventured to suggest not paying attention to the news, but, if we’d had a longer conversation about this, I suspect what he actually meant was that he no longer turned on the TV news, or bothered to listen to the top-of-the-hour news bulletin on radio stations, or picked up a newspaper along with the croissants on Saturday mornings.

One of the consequences of the loss of trust in the kind of media that dominated news collection and delivery in the 20th Century is the web-like control of information and disinformation that is now active every time you turn on your phone and connect to the internet. It’s no longer a choice to be ignorant, it’s an imposition.

Back in the Eucy Museum, I was there because – for some reason I’m not thoroughly sure of – I’m working with the volunteer committee to help set up an Eucalyptus Art Show and prizes. Gum trees! Favourite subject for hordes, crowds and battalions of enthusiastic amateur and professional painters, from stark outback tree-alone scenes to the glorious exuberance of a flowering gum. The Eucy show will be part of a weekend arts trail in October, inviting locals and visitors to visit some of the heritage sites in this big, sparsely populated shire — total population fewer than 8,000 people.

Hagglund reckons that one of the ways to make “this life” matter is to keep using and developing your social skills. Much to my surprise and oftentimes frustration, I have developed some competence in community festival organising. I won’t bore you with what that competence consists of, suffice to say patience and tolerance are in the mix — neither of which come easily.

Is this selfless? Well, it’s not selfish, or not entirely, because volunteering to do things makes me feel alive and worthwhile, so there’s certainly a flow-back to myself. Many people who volunteer will know how sour things can turn when what appears to be selflessness knocks up against neediness. It gets called “politics” when people find themselves at loggerheads on how things should be done. If you’ve ever been bullied out of a volunteer committee you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. Life’s too short to fight with intransigence.

Or is it? That’s what is confronting us, as a society, right now. Is it worth paying attention to yet another abuse of ethical decency and being upset by it?

What’s the right, the useful, the worthwhile response when the previously little-known Tasmanian Liberal Party Senator Claire Chandler uses Senate Estimates to call for the dismissal of musician Fred Leone from the advisory board of Creative Australia’s Music Australia because of what she claimed was his "anti-Jewish" comments on social media? And when the Albanese Government’s Tim Ayres (deputising for Minister Tony Burke) agrees that Mr Leone’s "anti-semitic comments were reprehensible, only for you to discover that, in fact, the comments were anti-Zionist?

Knowing about it just adds to the hopelessness, the despair, that the bullies are in control. Knowing about it adds to the swirl of thoughts that keep you awake at night.

Better not to know?

No, because ignorance is a force that feeds the monster and what we do know, what we must acknowledge, is the monster uses, then eventually preys on the ignorant. This life, as Hagglund says so wonderfully well, is made better and worthwhile because we are capable of 'caring for one another', so turning away is just not an option.

Now, about those gum trees…