Artist and cartoonist Andrew Dyson’s print depicting a small hand and large hand in the water, below a dark sky.
So the year is winding down and I’m at my desk, with a framed limited edition Leunig print for Australia’s Bicentenary on the side wall. Michael Leunig died this week. The Bicentenary print hangs above a framed signed Andrew Dyson print depicting a small hand and large hand in the water, below a dark sky, while the large hand is saying stop, the other is drowning. I’m listening to Ani DiFranco’s 1999 album “To The Teeth”.
She starts:
The sun is setting on the century
And we are armed to the teeth
We’re all working together now
To make our lives mercifully brief
And school kids keep trying to teach us
What guns are all about
Confused liberty with weaponry
And watch your kids act it out
And every year now like Christmas
Some boy gets the milk fed suburban blues
Reaches for the available arsenal
And saunters off to make the news.
The year’s not out, but a few days ago a teenage girl took a gun to her school in America, the Abundant Life Christian school, shot a teacher and fellow student dead and injured others. Then she shot herself dead. There’s still a week to go until 2024 expires.
To make the news. To be the news or to not be the news. It’s odds on 99 per cent of people would rather not make the news. These would be the people killed by massacre or revenge in the Mid-East, for instance. Give people the choice and I’m sure they would say, let me live a peaceful life, without violence, without anguish and turmoil, without being the victims of others’ ideology, or rage, or sheer bastardry.
The more than 1000 killed by Hamas surely would, the close to 50,000 Palestinians surely would. The thousands dead in Ukraine would, and in the many civil war conflicts globally. As I write this DiFranco is singing, “Don’t tell me it’s going to be all right. You can’t sell me on your optimism tonight.” And this was a generation ago. Mind you, 60 years ago Bob Dylan was singing the answer was blowing in the wind. That wind has never stopped blowing, still circling the globe, flattening communities, razing cities. Perhaps there is no answer, perhaps there is no question.
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Y is the letter that can’t be straightened. My grandmother used to say that when I asked of some event, why? Maybe she was onto something, or maybe she was exasperated with my queries.
Why is the question that is blowing in the wind. There are more guns in America, for instance, then there are people. Why is that? There can’t be that many wolves and squirrels to shoot surely. What else then becomes a target? Of course, humans. There have been close to 500 mass murders this year. In 2021, almost 49,000 people died from gun-related injuries.
If guns are a deliberate act of destruction, then so too is climate change. All reasonable people would think that surely no one wants to deliberately wreck the climate, and thus life on Earth as we know it, but the inaction to combat it is deliberate in that self-interest of corporations and nations trumps the world view. You could say once this was a long-term thing, but the trigger points are being reached ever faster. And yet nothing happens. Why? Because Y is a letter that can’t be straightened.
I look up at the Leunig print. The First Fleet’s HMS Sirius (which Leunig spells Serious) is moored in a harbour, the original inhabitants look at it from the shore, wildlife is being wildlife; on board on the lowest tier are the convicts, chained, above them soldiers with guns and a hangman with a noose, civilians cavorting, a churchman giving last rites to a condemned man, a couple hanging dead from the gallows, and on the top of the highest mast, the flag of the Union Jack. But above this is the night sky of dazzling stars, and freeflying birds.
Why? Perhaps because in spite of, and despite the human, there is a universe alien to greed and destruction and hate.
