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The Lack of Progressive Guts

How prepared are you to be arrested? How prepared are you to move beyond Keyboard Warriordom, and take your views and thoughts to The Streets?

It is so easy to sit back in the safety of one’s lounge, one’s study, one’s safe place on the verandah, one’s place of security and comfort, and from there sprout forth about Morrison, about the failings of the LNP and the ALP, about the negative influences that are demolishing this great nation that we hold dear.

Words are cheap. Even the best written words, without the attendant action attached to them, are just hot-no-go-anywhere circular air.

The problem with us Progressives is that we are reasonable people, we think that the people who are damaging our country will respond to logic, and reason, and fact. Bad mistake on our part.

If we wish for a better country, a better Australia, we need to move beyond words and put our guts on the line.

I question the fact that the ALP, the Greens, the Unions, GetUp! etc have not banded together (and got over themselves and their individual agendas) and called all of us out on the Streets to arrest the terrible direction that right-wing ideology is dragging our nation in.

Many years ago, in another time and another place, Sir Thomas More pointed out that Silence Condones Assent. It cost him his head. In the current era in Australia to have the courage to oppose, to say that what is happening is not right, might well have a personal cost attached. We have to look within ourselves to ascertain whether or not we are prepared to pay a cost for the convictions that we sprout.

It is my personal belief that we need to take to the Streets. It is my personal belief that we need to back up our words with action. We need to take risks, we need to put ourselves at risk. If we are not prepared to do so, then as Progressives, we are nothing more than sprouters of hot air.

Silence Condones Assent.

Note: this brief little article is not a lecture to you. It is actually a lecture to me. As a retired older Australian I have to remind myself that words are cheap. Change requires Action. Change requires the ‘doing of something’.

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14 comments

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  1. Stan

    Well said!

  2. RosemaryJ36

    Perhaps, through this website, we can pick a date for united action and suitable city locations so that we can organise a joint country-wide protest.

  3. Susan Wilson

    Agree, yes we need action, BUT first we have to understand what is really going on with right-wing regressive’s idealogy and why they don’t listen, keep lying and don’t care about people not like them. Our bodies are vehicles of energy, that means it is energy that gives us our thoughts and we all know this and all truth because it is ‘trapped’ inside us in our inner-heart. This explains that those using the energy of harm and lies is not connected to their body/inner heart – no heart feelings. They are only listening to a lying/harming energy of what we are not from their heads. Those who live with truth and can see exactly what is happening live with the intelligence from their body/inner-heart which heals and cannot harm anything or anyone. Recognize the difference with people you see running the world – we are either lying/harming or living truth/healing. Unfortunately until we understand this universal truth we usually want to fight the harming and lying energy which has to be fed by energy and therefore we contribute to its destructive ways. However, if we understand the difference and stay connected and present with our bodies we given the intelligence and energy to keep us vital and effective by using own true power and authority. If we feed the lying/harming energy we first harm ourselves and others whilst making the monster grow by fighting when we have to starve this monster with love (love being observing the situation and not contributing to its energy from awareness and understanding). That does not mean not taking action though, true action comes first by not feeding the energy, secondly by speaking and writing truth (we all know it) and living it by taking responsibility for the lies that we tell ourselves. That first lie is to not live who we all are equally so, divine beings in a physical body, here to reflect that and also to learn from nature that to survive with vitality we have to work together, which is the point of your article. For environmental groups, climate change groups etc. unless we change ourselves we cannot change the environment or the climate because those problems all stem from us not being who we are.

  4. CrudeFury133

    Without guns, without drones, without supporting mass movements? Where would you end up, in jail?
    For what?
    Sure, you are right. Anybody would see the point?

  5. New England Cocky

    Agreed. We stopped the Vietnam War on the streets.

  6. RomeoCharlie29

    Well said indeed. One is reminded of the quote, attributed, some say erroneously, to Edmund Burke that for evil to triumph it is sufficient that good men ( and, I would add ‘women’) do nothing. The questions are good: I wonder if I, at the age of 74, am willing to go to Gaol?. I have held placards at anti fracking demos but supergluing myself to a road? Of course there are actions between these extremes and yes, it behoves us all to take action because Morrison, Dutton and their evil brethren are determined to crush our rights to protest in the name of the so-called ‘silent Australians ‘ who, of course, they alone represent and whose views they can purport to represent. Protesters are noisy Australians and therefore unrepresentative, and unrepresentable, at least by ‘decent people’. This worldview must be challenged. On 7.30 this week Leigh Sales asked Christian Porter (The AG) how our society had reached a point where wage theft, or the horrid treatment of our elderly, had become normal practice. Porter didn’t answer directly but we know the answer, it is a direct result of the cruel and heartless leadership of the LNP and it’s treatment of refugees for starters but deregulation, privatisation and subservience to vested interests whose only goals are the pursuit of money and power.

  7. Phil Pryor

    Turn the nation’s government into a brothel full of keen sluts for money and a pose of being desirable and worthwhile and we have farce, fraud, freaks, fools, filth. Morrison’s rottenness is based on stupidity and drenched superstitous fantasy. He gets up up every day, supercharged with lies, triumphs, overbearing foolishness, corrupt policy, defective mentality and a fascist will to be overbearing. Evil

  8. Keitha Granville

    Protests don’t need to be superglueing yourself to the road, or chaining yourself to a bulldozer. We need to Gandhi like, simply turning out whenever there is a protest or a demo about anything that we care about, and just BEING there. Moving on when told by police,so not risking arrest or injury, but just being one of the number. Can you imagine the consternation of all politicians if thousands of people ALWAYS turned out for demos, not just handfuls, STREETSFUL.

    Yes, we stopped Vietnam, here in Tas we stopped the Franklin Dam. And there have been others. We have to get the minds of the people out of their own business, and into the business of saving our country and our planet from the fascists.

    It makes you wonder what might have happened if enough Germans had stood up to Hitler and the Nazis.

  9. DrakeN

    Like everything in politics, it is a numbers game.
    More people of all ages and across all classes of the population expressing their indignation and intention to vote for anyone other than the candidates from the Party in governance is all that is required to change political policy.

    But, the people must become properly informed and motivated which will require:
    a. silencing of the deliberate disinformation by the mainstream commercial media and
    b. enough popular noise to awaken from their solumnence of the quiet sleeping majority.

    It will not be easy.

  10. David Bruce

    When people lose HOPE you can expect to see the pitchforks!

    Until then, good people will try anything to negotiate in good faith.

    When activists are threatened with loss of income, as is the case now, I believe we are getting closer to the sharpening of the pitch forks!

  11. Patricia

    “I question the fact that the ALP, the Greens, the Unions, GetUp! etc have not banded together (and got over themselves and their individual agendas) and called all of us out on the Streets to arrest the terrible direction that right-wing ideology is dragging our nation in.”

    There is an answer to your question as to why the ALP and the Greens have not banded together, other than the fact that the Greens see the ALP as the enemy to be overcome, and that is that having a compliant population means that any government can do exactly as they want. And what they want, no matter what colour they stand under, is to be able to bring into being what their particular ideology dictates, without those pesky people getting in the way.

    If we had a political cadre that actually went into politics to do good for the country, then the people would expect those on the opposition and cross benches to be as up in arms about what the LNP is doing, as some of the more enlightened of the people are, but we don’t, we have career politicians whose only aim is to hold onto their jobs, basically because they can do nothing else, having done nothing else in their adult lives, and all the while to appear to be working for the people by glad handing all over the countryside while spending as much money as they can on anything that does not provide a benefit to the country’s future or the people.

    Politics is not about representing the people, it is about getting a cushy job and hanging onto it. Otherwise there would be no need of parties or coalitions of parties to make up a majority of votes, we would have all our representatives making decisions on our behalf, as representative democracy (a misnomer if ever there was one) should be but it has been sold to the dupes that make up so called democratic population as a popularity contest where only some of the people are represented and the rest are told to sit down and shut up until their brand of politician is in the big chair and then they can feel smug about “being in power”.

    Just look at the American democratic voting system. Whole swathes of people are refused a vote for various spurious reasons, a candidate who gets more votes by almost 3 million loses, because a small number of mainly white republican men make a decision as to who actually takes the prize.

    Representative democracy, pfffffft.

  12. king1394

    Most of us are also slaves to debt and constrained by the needs of our dependents. People will do what they can as individuals, including joining in protests, but they still have to get to work in the morning.

  13. Kitty

    This song says it all.

    Have You Been to Jail for Justice?
    Peter, Paul and Mary
    Was it Cesar Chavez or Rosa Parks that day?
    Some say Dr. King or Ghandi
    Set them on their way
    No matter who your mentors are
    It’s pretty plain to see
    That if you’ve been to jail for justice
    You’re in good company
    Have you been to jail for justice?
    I want to shake your hand
    ‘Cause sitting in and laying down
    Are ways to take a stand
    Have you sung a song for freedom
    Or marched that picket line?
    Have you been to jail for justice?
    Then you’re a friend of mine
    You law abiding citizens
    Come listen to this song
    Laws are made by people
    And people can be wrong
    Once unions were against the law
    But slavery was fine
    Women were denied the vote
    While children worked the mine
    The more you study history
    The less you can deny it
    A rotten law stays on the books
    ’til folks with guts defy it!
    Have you been to jail for justice?
    I want to shake your hand
    ‘Cause sitting in and laying down
    Are ways to take a stand
    Have you sung a song for freedom
    Or marched that picket line?
    Have you been to jail for justice?
    Then you’re a friend of mine
    Well the law is supposed to serve us
    And so are the police
    When the system fails
    It’s up to us to speak our piece
    We must be ever vigilant
    For justice to prevail
    So get courage from your convictions
    Let ’em haul you off to jail!
    Have you been to jail for justice?
    I want to shake your hand
    ‘Cause sitting in and laying down
    Are ways to take a stand
    Have you sung a song for freedom
    Or marched that picket line?
    Have you been to jail for justice?
    Then you’re a friend of mine
    Have you been to jail for justice
    Have you been to jail for justice
    Have you been to jail for justice
    Then you’re a friend of mine
    Source: Musixmatch
    Songwriters: anne feeney

  14. Lawrence S. Roberts

    Do you really think being a ‘keyboard warrior’ is a safe pursuit in Herr Kiflers 5th Riech?

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