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Sort of but not exactly

August 2012

SuperAdmin

An open letter to my unborn daughte

Your skull will still be soft after you’re born, so maybe I should wait a little while – say, fifteen or twenty years – before I start filling your head with all the things I want to tell you. It might take me that long, anyway, to decide whether to shield you from the world or to just plonk you down in front of ABC News 24 and let you work it all out for yourself… because sitting on the couch, watching wars and famines and massacres and Masterchef on TV, is sooooo dangerous. We’re not Lady Gaga-rich but we’re filthy privileged. It’s a miracle, except that – sorry, here’s Lesson 1 – miracles, unlike Gruffalos, don’t exist.

You’ll learn quickly that I complain a lot. Don’t worry about it. Sure, I’m a champion fretter but I love life. I love tree-studded hills. I love rainbows. I love bad jokes and laughter that shakes the walls. I love cows: looking at them and eating them. I can’t begin to tell you how much I love homemade olive and pepperoni pizza (although, technically, I’m off processed meats), washed down with cheap red wine. I love sunrises and rain-soaked days. I love cuddles. I love great novels and bad football journalism. I love strange people (but not too strange). I love working, far too much for my own good. 

But I also love pointing out – long and loud –  everything that is wrong with everything. I’m a rooted-in-the-mainstream dissenter, a there’s-good-in-everyone cynic. It’s meditative, like the yoga your mum does. I groan, as if somebody’s thumped my pizza-stuffed stomach, when I read the newspapers. I heckle and wave my arms about when I watch the 7.30 Report, and then I change channels. I whinge about how much Murray River water our household uses (seriously, we’re worse than rice farmers and El Niño combined). And yet this morning I took a twenty-minute shower to loosen my concrete neck (or because it’s luxuriating standing under that steaming waterfall, listening to the precious stuff gurgle its way down the drain and out to sea). 

Prepare yourself: I get especially grumpy at Christmas, when we all – me too – prattle on about peace and harmony and goodwill to all humanity as if we mean it. But then I eat my ham and coleslaw and sip my ice-cold Heineken and open my presents. I’m a self-indulgent hypocrite, apathy my worst sin and my saving grace, but it’s not entirely my own fault. I’m indoctrinated, and thank goodness for that. 

Freedom of speech is our birthright but too much complaining is unAustralian: it messes with our ‘no-worries’™ brand. Pull your heads in, all you whinging athletes who missed Olympic selection … and be comforted that you’ve avoided an event – a movement – that each day seems more and more like a cult. We’ve got it easy. We get to blame our politicians for everything (listen Julia and Tony, what the Australian people want is for you to turn the boats back without telling anybody so that we can carry on imagining ourselves a nation of über humanitarians: is that really so much to ask?). Employing an intricately constructed work-life balance, we make time to sign online petitions. Now and again we march in protest rallies, clearing the lungs, the head, the conscience with a chant about something, anything. ‘No blood for oil’ and ‘Holding the ball, ump’ are my personal favourites but I trust you to choose your own.

Some of the things I want to tell you about I can’t explain – because I’ll never understand them myself. Like why did the man sitting behind me in the train the other day whisper ‘shut up shut up shut up shut up’ every time the two Sudanese blokes sitting opposite him spoke to each other? Like how is it that men keep getting away with the fantasy that we’re the new oppressed gender? When you’re older, maybe you can explain that one to me. Mind you, since I’m a bloke I’ll probably cry foul too when it suits me. No, I’ll hint foul, because it’s a subtle downtroddenness we’re feigning. Call me on it, will you? Even if I’m changing your nappy at the time.

 

Patrick Allington

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