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We will always have our secret thoughts

28 Mar

Give-No-Privacy

 

I once met a man who told me he had no privacy.

I found this difficult to comprehend. A life without privacy?

But I will always have my secret thoughts, he told me with grim satisfaction. As if he was engaged in ongoing battle with an intruder who demanded full knowledge, and was winning with his secrecy what could only have been a Pyrrhic victory.

The high cost of concealment, not because of choice, but because of necessity.

This week we have all lost our privacy, with the passing of metadata retention legislation that enables the state and its agents to access our online lives without a warrant, and at their whim. We have now become citizens who are assumed by our government to be guilty until proven innocent, a monumental inversion of our legal process that has passed largely unremarked. We have now become possible subjects of pre-emptive, not after-the-fact investigation by the state. We are instructed to trust the state not to abuse the privileges it has  awarded itself, and turn them against us. We have been infantilised to an unprecedented degree. In the eyes of the state, grown citizens now are the equivalent of toddlers.

I think about how an individual’s life is impoverished by a lack of privacy. Not because the individual necessarily has anything he or she wants or needs to hide, but because if we are to attain maturity as autonomous human beings we must have private time in which to achieve this. We must have private time for our thoughts, desires, imaginings, innovations, failures. We must have a door that we can close, a space in which we can claim ownership of our selves that is uninterrupted, and unadulterated by the presence and expectations of another. Privacy is one of the resources a human being needs to flourish. In conditions of diminished privacy, the capacity for critical subjectivity is equally diminished. A healthy individual and a healthy society need privacy if they are to thrive.

If, as I have argued, the capacity for critical subjectivity shrinks in conditions of diminished privacy, what happens to the capacity for democratic self-government? Conditions of diminished privacy shrink the latter capacity as well, because they impair both the capacity and the scope for the practice of citizenship. But a liberal democratic society cannot sustain itself without citizens who possess the capacity for democratic self-government. A society that permits the unchecked ascendancy of surveillance infrastructures cannot hope to remain a liberal democracy. Under such conditions, liberal democracy as a form of government is replaced, gradually but surely, by a different form of government that I will call modulated democracy because it relies on a form of surveillance that operates by modulation. Modulation and modulated democracy emerge as networked surveillance technologies take root within democratic societies characterized by advanced systems of informational capitalism. Citizens within modulated democracies—citizens who are subject to pervasively distributed surveillance and modulation by powerful commercial and political interests—increasingly will lack the capacity to form and pursue meaningful agendas for human flourishing. Julie E Cohen. What Privacy is For.

An individual or government driven to the exercise of crude power over another in the form of surveillance, is an individual or government driven by fear, and deceived by the illusion of control. Like the man who told me he had no privacy but will always have his secret thoughts, subjects, whether in their capacity as citizens or as relating individuals, will be compelled to resist invasive surveillance conducted by the state or another in their lives, or they will mentally dis-integrate, and cease to thrive.

We have always had our secret thoughts, however, the difference now is that those secret thoughts are no longer entirely ours by choice, but by necessity, if we are to protect ourselves from pre-emptive investigation by the state and its agents. The need for a  whole new level of secrecy has been added to our lives, since we are now a surveilled people and our online lives are an open book. Every move we make online is no longer our own business, but the business of any state-sanctioned authority who chooses to make us the subject of their enquiries. This power disparity cannot help but change our natures, and not for the better. We will be forced to engage in an ongoing battle with the surveilling authorities, or we will dis-integrate.

And the majority of us apparently don’t care.

Snowden

 

 

 

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Random political concerns

17 Mar

Political Greed

 

1. Is the taxpayer funding Treasurer Joe Hockey’s defamation case against Fairfax Press?

Nobody seems to be able to get a satisfactory answer to this question, so this morning I sent Mr Hockey a tweet:

If the taxpayer is not funding Mr Hockey’s action, why doesn’t the government simply come out and say so, thus laying the speculation to rest? Things are bad enough for them, one imagines, without further unnecessary public grumblings.

I do hope the Treasurer has time to spend on the budget, given his preoccupation with savaging Fairfax in court for allegedly making him look “odious.” Fairfax also allegedly made Hockey’s dad cry, and caused his daughter to ask him if people were trying to buy him.

Just as well Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd never took up arms against the Murdoch Press, otherwise they’d have spent their entire political careers in court. The idea of politicians suing media for defamation is mind-bogglingly stupid but as Treasurer Hockey claims as justification: “The only thing you walk out of politics with is your reputation.”

Ummmm….. He was being ironic, right? Right?

2. With the next budget due in about eight weeks, why is Prime Minister Tony Abbott still reassuring us that he is “listening” to our concerns about the last one, rather than looking to the future and giving us some indication of what is in store? Instead he seems intent on adding to the list of “backflips” he’s had to make since last May, and once again we find ourselves in country that has become all too familiar since Abbott took leadership of the LNP, the Land of Unrelenting Negativity. Is there anything more negative than backflips?

I was right yesterday and today I have totally changed my mind and I am still right, otherwise known as the Christopher Pyne patented olympic gold backflip, heralds a new low in egregious LNP spin. The Education Minister was forced to de-link higher education reforms from the funding of scientific research, an abhorrent linkage that should never, in anybody’s wildest dreams, have existed in the first place. Somewhere in all the sound and fury Pyne managed to add that it is all Labor’s fault.

The explanations and excuses for this spectacularly bizarre method of governance are that it continues to be the fault of Labor, that Abbott is “learning” from his mistakes, that Abbott is “listening” to the people’s discontent, and that everything jaw-droppingly frightful he says is taken out of context, nevertheless he stands by it and if he doesn’t, everyone makes mistakes and anyway, anyway, it’s all Labor’s fault.

A Prime Minister still in the potty-training phase is a frightening prospect for a country. Abbott has been in politics for decades, served as a Minister in the Howard government, and as Leader of the Opposition. He is by no means a political novice, and yet we are being asked, almost daily, to give him another chance to adapt to his new responsibilities.

If he is still attempting to grasp the nature of his job by now, he needs to resign from it, because no country can afford a leader who this far into his first term still has no idea what he’s doing and where he is going.

If, like me, you are finding it difficult to keep up with Abbott’s horrible mangling of just about everything, Sally McManus has thoughtfully set up a “Tracking Abbott’s Wreckage” page right here.

3. In case you are confused by Senator George Brandis’s tumultuous, some might even allege abusive relationship with the proposed metadata laws, here’s what he said this morning. Bloggers, he declares, are not journalists, so we are not covered by the amendments that will protect those who are “journalists by profession.”

The debate over whether or not bloggers are journalists continues to exercise legal and media minds in Australia, while the issue is far more clear-cut in the US and New Zealand. Essentially in Australia bloggers will not be protected by the same metadata amendments as are professional journalists, in that we have to reveal our sources whilst they do not. This would likely affect a blogger such as the indefatigable Wixxyleaks, who continues to do a sterling job exposing the HSU/Kathy Jackson shenanigans.

Essentially, metadata retention laws create a situation in which we are all assumed to be guilty of something in our online lives. The ramifications of the state taking such an attitude towards its citizens are many, and I don’t believe it’s what governments are designed to do in a liberal democracy. The utter spinelessness of the ALP on this matter ought to make us vote for anyone but the major parties, because there’s not, as I might have said before, a bee’s dick of difference in their policies on this. Governments are not granted power in order to turn it against citizens, en masse and if they do, they can expect that one day the citizens will, en masse, turn against them.

Civil Disobedience

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Pachamama. The earth is our mother.

14 Mar

pale_blue_dot

I’ve just heard a Radio National Science Show story that has stirred my imagination more than anything in a long time.

Robin Williams interviewed Canadian environmental activist, scientist and academic David Suzuki, who is  the driving force behind a movement to have enshrined in the Canadian constitution a clause that states everyone has the right to clean water, clean air, and food.

One hundred and ten countries already have protection for the earth enshrined in their constitutions. Ecuador, Bolivia and Mexico have guaranteed protection for Pachamama, Mother Earth, in theirs. Suzuki, together with First Nations peoples, artists, musicians, and writers such as Margaret Atwood, are taking the Blue Dot Tour around Canada and having extraordinary  success in their campaign to persuade cities and municipalities to adopt the Blue Dot Declaration for a Healthy Environment.

However, this isn’t merely a grand statement. So far fourteen cities, including Montreal and Vancouver, have committed to enacting legislation protecting the environment within the next two years.

The Blue Dot Tour takes its name from the famous essay by Carl Sagan, written after Voyager I cameras were, at his suggestion, trained on earth. Our planet appeared as a pale blue dot in a sea of darkness. Here is an extract from Sagan’s essay:

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here, that’s home, that’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on the mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. 

The significance of the proposed Canadian environmental protection legislation is considerable. The burden of evidence will shift from  activists who currently must prove a developmental project will damage the environment, to developers who will have to prove it will not. Such legislative shifts immediately change the discourse, putting the well-being of Pachamama and the human beings living on her and with her before economic considerations and profit.

As Suzuki points out, without air we die in three minutes. Without clean air we become sick. Without water we die in a few days. Without clean water we become sick. Without food we die in a couple of weeks.

In NSW, changes introduced by the LNP government now determine that the “principal consideration” for decision makers such as the Planning Assessment Committee must be the economic benefits of the proposed mining project. The massive Shenhua coal mining venture in the Liverpool Plains, vigorously opposed by environmentalists and farmers for almost seven years, was given approval at the end of January 2015, after twice being knocked back, under this “principal consideration” change.

However, the matter is now before federal Environment Minister Greg Hunt, who has “stopped the clock” on the project until further investigation into the effects of the mine under federal government Water Trigger Legislation, which states that

Australia’s national environment law, the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC Act), was amended in June 2013, to provide that water resources are a matter of national environmental significance, in relation to coal seam gas and large coal mining development.

It will be very interesting to see how Greg Hunt handles this situation.

Those of us living on this part of the mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam could send an email to Greg Hunt, quoting the extract from the Carl Sagan essay above.

Pale-Blue-Dot

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I don’t effing care if you call yourself a feminist or not.

8 Mar

Like Groundhog Day, International Women’s Day yet a fucking gain, finds itself hijacked and imprisoned in the eternally recurring culture war chatter, I won’t dignify it with the term debate, as to whether you call yourself a feminist or not.

I could not give a rat’s chlamydic arse if a woman calls herself a feminist or not. In fact the minute I get a whiff that the argument’s on I want to start flame throwing.

I don’t care about your personal philosophies on this day at this time. I don’t care if you are personally confused about whether or not to put on make-up in the morning. I so, so do not care if you have a luxurious bush or a full Brazilian. I do not care if you are sometimes a good feminist sometimes a bad one, whatever the fucking hell either of those things actually are. Fuck off with all the confessional shit just for today, and engage with a bigger picture, I’m begging you.

I have a dream. In my dream every woman with a public voice just for once refuses these speaking and writing engagements and instead throws her weight behind a National Day of Mourning on March 8, for the women world-wide, and particularly in Australia because this is our homeland where we can best have influence, who are murdered and abused by intimate partners, as well as the children who witness and suffer.

I have a dream that if women with a public voice do accept speaking and writing engagements on this, our one fucking day of the entire fucking year, they will agree to speak out all day long about domestic violence, government responsibilities, and the safety and protection of women and children, and nothing else.

I have a dream that we will march in the streets with banners and posters and candles on this day, protesting the deaths and injuries, emotional and physical, that so many of us across all demographics endure or have endured in the place where we are supposed to be safe, our homes.

I have a dream that we will unite to take on this Abbott government full frontal in its despicable cuts to frontline domestic violence services that will leave women in the most remote and already under-serviced areas with absolutely nowhere to go.

It is far more important, sisters, that we keep women alive and capable of adequately functioning than it is that we get more already privileged women on to fucking boards, or listed in Wikipedia, or winning fucking literary prizes. The only way we will do this at this point, is to get our lady arses out into the sodding streets, and if necessary, just like the women who got us the vote, chaining ourselves to the fucking railings until politicians give our dire, deathly situation priority.

Dear ladies, for 364 days of the fucking year you can write and speak all you want about your bush or your Brazilian, or your personal philosophy, or how women have to learn achieve within the same rotten, stinking, oppressive power structure as men without even questioning that fucking structure, otherwise they will be automatically forbidden entry to it, but for one day, for one fucking, fucking day, can we focus on the biggest, most life-threatening danger to women in this country, and how nothing has improved in family violence statistics since feminism’s second wave, over forty years ago.

And if we can’t, I’m going to poke everybody’s eyes out with fucking burnt sticks.

Listen to this Background Briefing report this morning on the effects of the Abbott government’s funding cuts to frontline domestic violence services. Then tell me your fucking pubic hair choices matter. Tell me after listening to this whether you call yourself a feminist or not matters jack shit in the scheme of things.

Sorry for all the language.

No, I’m fucking not.

I-am-a-feminist

 

 

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A Royal Commission worth its salt

7 Mar

royal_commissionFormer headmaster of Knox Grammar, Ian Paterson OA, has over the last few days experienced a most spectacular fall from grace as he attempted, before the Royal Commission into Child Sexual Abuse in Institutions, to ‘rewrite’ the history of his mismanagement of the sexual abuse of students under his care, by what appears to be a nest of pedophiles employed by the school as teachers.

Stripped of all his considerable power, Paterson was confronted by the realities of his alleged failures and their consequences, while arrangements were made at Knox to rename the Paterson Centre for Ethics and Business as part of an eradication plan that includes calls for him to be stripped of his Order of Australia.

If ever a Royal Commission was worth its salt, this one is. I understand there have been some five hundred referrals by the Commission to police for further investigation.

However, what the Commission demonstrates more powerfully than anything else is the complex web of secrecy and denial that allows the sexual abuse of children, both in institutions and the home, to continue at unthinkable levels for many, many decades. Only with the enabling silence of others can crimes such as these flourish.

We have witnessed, heartbreakingly, since the Commission shone its light on the Catholic and Anglican churches and the Salvation Army, as well as other institutions, that their common practices were designed not to protect the children in their care, but the pedophiles who filled young lives with confusion, fear, and long-lasting trauma.

It is worth remembering that our Prime Minister and Minister for Women, Tony Abbott, himself provided support and a reference for convicted pedophile John Nestor, describing him as “a beacon of humanity.” (This link is a thorough and interesting read, by the way.)

It is also worth remembering that Cardinal George Pell, compassionately challenged towards the victims of his pedophile priests, was a moral and spiritual advisor to both John Howard during his term as Prime Minister, and Tony Abbott. Pell was Abbott’s personal confessor, and Abbott is a staunch Pell defender. The Cardinal’s recent hasty removal by the Vatican from the Commission’s inquiry into sexual depravities in the Catholic church, to take on fiscal responsibilities in Rome, was convenient for both men.

The conspiracy of silence perpetrated by those with power and authority such as Paterson, Pell, Abbott and many, many others has caused the misery and ruination of untold young lives. If the Royal Commission achieves nothing else, it has exposed this conspiracy and some of the powerful names who supported it. Most will not, of course, suffer the same fate as Paterson, though they undoubtedly deserve to.

We can thank our lucky stars this Royal Commission was instigated by the previous government, because the likelihood of the Abbott government allowing these atrocities against children to be exposed and interrogated is less than none.

We are witnessing, and not just in Australia, the overthrow of a cruelly silencing and mendacious narrative, and in its place, the narrative of experiential truth. This is a global shift of extraordinary proportions, and I think we can take heart from it, even in these dark times.

 

 

 

 

 

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ABC TV Qanda excludes Indigenous women yet again

4 Mar

 

Adventures in Democracy

 

ABC TV panel show Qanda will mark International Women’s Day in its March 6 program with a panel consisting entirely of women, and hosted not by the urbane Tony Jones, but by Kitchen Cabinet’s Annabel Crabb.

The panel consists of Julie Bishop, American Roxanne Gay, Professor of English at Purdue University; Holly Kramer, CEO of Best and Less; Germaine Greer, “feminist icon” etc. and Yassmin Abdel-Magied, founder of Youth Without Borders, an organisation focused on enabling young people to work together for the implementation of positive change within their communities. 

Indigenous women are not represented on this panel.

As was noted in the recent Qanda panel on domestic violence, no Indigenous women were invited to participate in that either, although Antoinette Braybrook, CEO of the Aboriginal Family Violence Prevention and Legal Service Victoria, was allegedly asked by producers if she could recommend an Indigenous man to appear on the show.

The exclusion of Indigenous women from the national broadcaster’s celebration of International Women’s Day reveals again the depth of racism and apartheid  in which this country is so thoroughly steeped it is normalised, and unremarked.

There is no possible excuse for this exclusion. It is absolutely shameful.

If you are moved to ask Qanda why Indigenous women have been excluded from their IWD panel you can do that here. You could also invite the producers to get really adventurous in democracy, and adopt the practice of  inclusion.

You could also remind the ABC that Indigenous women and men pay taxes, and it is their ABC as much as it is any other citizen’s of this country.

I also wish they would stop wheeling out Germaine Greer as our “feminist icon.” I don’t know what a feminist icon is, but I do know Greer hasn’t said anything interesting for a long time though other women have, including Indigenous women.

This woman won’t be watching.

 

 

 

 

 

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Men. This is what you can do for us.

24 Feb

 

keep-calm-and-respect-women-37

The increasing tension provoked by men participating in public discussions about family violence is serving only to distract us from our focus on the topic.

This excellent piece by Amy Gray in The Guardian in which she analyses the problematics of a dominantly male panel on ABC TV’s Qanda last night (unfortunately titled “Family Violence Special”) affirms my assertion and I urge you to read it.

Denying anyone a voice is not my thing, often to my own disadvantage and at times almost ruin, but on this topic, at this stage, I don’t think men on panels are doing us much good at all.

I speak only for myself, and when I see that a panel on family violence, perpetrated by far more men than women, is a panel actually dominated by men, my question is WTF?

Followed by, I’m tuning out because there is nothing men have to say on this topic that I am ready and willing to hear at this point. That doesn’t mean I don’t like you, respect you and in some instances, love you. It means you need to step away because we need our moment, like we need the air we breathe.

I want the issue handled publicly by women, and there are thousands of women in this country who have the most extraordinary insight, expertise and personal experience to keep a thousand panels going for a thousand and one nights.

If I was a man I can’t imagine fronting up to such a gig and thinking my point of view counted for very much at all in that setting.

Addressing reasons why men are violent towards women and children is of course fundamental to prevention. Perhaps this is a topic that could sustain a panel all of its own, and not be conflated with the rare opportunity for the primary victims and survivors of family violence and their advocates to speak publicly on the topic.

I am likely going to cop all kinds of shit for saying this, but what I ask of men is that you focus your attention on other men, and vacate the space, just quietly leave the space of public discussion such as last night’s Qanda, for women. This is what you can do for us.

I know not all men hit women and children, and I know it’s offensive to some men to be lumped in with the hitters. But what I say to you is your sense of offence is nothing compared to us being hit, so don’t ask us to deal with it, and don’t expect us to listen to it because we can’t, and there’s no reason why we should.

We cannot stop violent men making non violent men look and feel bad. You have to do that yourselves.

Women need our moment. We need it like the air we breathe. You can do this for us. Respect.

 

 

 

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It isn’t what it effing is.

24 Feb

id est quo id est

I’m not a physically violent woman but when somebody says “It is what it is” I want to smack them repeatedly upside the head  and bite them till they swear never to say it again, at least not in my hearing.

What does it mean? What does it effing mean? What does it mean when someone stands in front of you like Obi-Wan Kenobi and says, “It is what it is” and why is it wrong to want to poke them in both ears with your Jedi knight light saber?

The meaning of the phrase is illegible. It lacks any relation to reality. It contributes nothing to the understanding of our lives.

The phrase belongs in a suppository of ersatz wisdom of the kind peddled by pop psychology hacks, who think that the mere repetition of words like “Love” “Happiness” “Acceptance” “Joy” “Family” will make everything that’s nasty go away, especially if you paint those words on a piece of distressed faux wood and hang it on the wall.

The signs claim and are claimed to represent the real.  This is a fine example of Baudrillard’s “order of sorcery” in which meaning is conjured so that it appears to be referentially linked to the real, but in fact simulates reality and renders meaning illegible and obsolete.

Our biggest and most difficult concepts reduced to prescriptives on distressed faux wood.

Representation used as replacement for the real. Unlike the myriad forms of art, which at their best are an exploration of the emotion and psychology of our big ideas that move, inspire, frighten and otherwise stir the human heart.

From a psychological perspective the phrase sounds to me like resignation, capitulation, the verbal expression of a depressive perception that nothing can ever change, because “it is what it is.”

Or it’s a closing down of conversation, as in, what is the point of talking about this anymore because “it is what it is.”

Well, sod off, Jedi Master. By all means say, I don’t want to talk about this anymore. That’s honest. But don’t disguise your reluctance for discussion as the utterance of a universal truth.

It isn’t what it effing is. If we have learnt nothing else these past decades, we ought to have learned the inevitable fluidity of circumstances, that nothing is or can be certain, and that one of the most damaging things we can do to ourselves or others is to demand certainty where there can be none.

finis

 

 

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The Bali Two, and profiting from human misery

21 Feb

 

heroinSmall

 

In his piece on Thursday in The Drum, Jonathan Green asks what of the victims of heroin traffickers Chan and Sukumaran, had the two succeeded in smuggling their product into Australia?

Green points out that the traffickers made a “Faustian” pact, the reality of the death of others against their own enrichment: the most brutal and callous entrepreneurship imaginable.

There’s no contesting that fact. Yet if we’re going to discuss profiting from the misery of others, more than half the human species will be found guilty of that Faustian pact. If these millions (billions?) of guilty face the fate of Chan and Sukumaran, the planet will be drenched in blood, a good deal of it the exsanguination of people in high places.

While it’s de rigueur to focus attention on the drug trade as the cause of suffering and death from which others make enormous financial profit, the list of such businesses is long, many of them are legal and many of them are state sanctioned, from the war machines of the Western world, to the liquor outlet that sells more alcohol to the already drunk who then get in a car and kill innocent bystanders.

And this is only thinking in terms of profiting from death. What about the myriad other forms of misery inflicted on one human by another for profit that results not in death, but in a tormented life? Then think about what we do to other species in the unrelenting search for profit, and the prestige, comfort and power profit brings.

That Chan and Sukumaran should be singled out from all the rest for execution makes little sense.

It is one of the awful realities of victimisation that justice is rarely commensurate with the crime.

Chan and Sukumaran chose to deal drugs, knowing that fatalities would result. Users choose to buy and use them, knowing the risk they take with their lives and the lives of those who love and care for them. These ghastly transactions take place in a society that is wilfully blind to its own stupidities in the matter of illegal drugs, such as how that illegality is determined and on what prejudices it is based, and the resulting  failure of that society to combat both the trade, and its devastating effects on so many lives.

In other words it is a systemic failure, and the system as it currently functions enables a marketplace for the plying of the deadly business.

I have no truck with celebrities unconvincingly claiming “I stand for mercy” in the matter of Chan and Sukumaran. Not because I want those two young men to die such ghastly deaths. I don’t. But as Green points out, where are the celebrities when thousands are put to death in the US, China, Saudi Arabia, and where are the celebrities when foreign nationals are tied to posts for execution in Indonesia?

And where are the celebrities when yet another user dies a solitary death because a government refuses safe injecting rooms, and needle exchanges, and  leaves its young to die alone in filthy gutters?

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Learning to swim

20 Feb

Last night on ABC TV one of the more interesting truth seekers of the last decade, documentary film maker Louis Theroux, spent time with paroled sex offenders in Los Angeles.

I was a little chary of watching after growing up with abuse. It’s never possible to be certain that something you see or hear or smell or taste or feel or touch won’t revive a memory you thought safely long gone, as Proust observed some while before the term “trigger warning” was coined.

Theroux has the style of the best therapists: his presence is fearless, he will go wherever his subject wants to take him, and his skilled use of silence creates a space in which others can speak what they may not otherwise say.

As he frankly admitted, there were ways in which Theroux liked some of his subjects, while at the same time being unwilling and unable to set aside from his thinking their crimes, and the effects of those crimes on others, particularly children.

I felt sadness and pity for the broken, lonely lives led by the offenders.

It is almost impossibly difficult to express any emotions other than revulsion, hatred, and outrage towards sex offenders, and their crimes are deserving of all those feelings.  It is understandably required of us that our compassion be directed only towards their victims. But I am wondering if it is possible to hold the care and concern for the victim, and the sad pity for the perpetrator in the mind and heart at the same time.

It isn’t something I could have considered until I’d spent decades dealing with an aftermath of traumatic abuse that never really ends. It just changes. There are ways in which a life is broken by such experiences, and is only really ever cobbled together again. If you haven’t had a childhood, nothing and no one can ever give it to you. There is a loneliness in knowing darkness, because darkness separates you forever from those who haven’t known it. The predator passes on their broken, lonely life.

Because of my circumstances and its effects on me, I never learned to properly swim. One day, Mrs Chook said, I am going to teach you to swim properly.

I was full of fear. I couldn’t put my head under water, or breathe. She coaxed, and encouraged, and rewarded and persisted, and one day it all fell into place, and I was swimming properly.

This is one of the greatest gifts anyone has ever given me. I can be a child in the pool. I never knew what it was to be a child in a pool. Now I take that child for a swim whenever I have the chance and when we’ve swum our laps, we play.

 

Quint Buccholz Two

 

So the point of this is, I  was wondering if this long, gradual, infinite process of healing myself as best I can, with the most enormous amount of help and love, has brought me to a place where I can watch Louis Theroux give a voice to people like the one who stole my childhood, and feel sad pity for his broken life. I am wondering, is this what forgiveness is?

I am currently confined by two circumstances. Illness, and the edges of tropical cyclone Marcia. Our house is like a snug, dry cave and through the windows there’s our garden, lush, green and dripping. Confinement has it purposes, if one can but see them.

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