Ghost those arseholes

I think Australia has enough applicants for the job of polite social change advocate. Asking nicely is a guaranteed pathway to failure, however in Australia you can have a career as a failure: someone who in quiet desperation beseeches the powers that be to do better.

Asking nicely works really well when there are no stakes. For a country that was taken by force many of this nation's inhabitants are strangely fixated on approaching power in the most powerless ways possible. Of course, this is because to professionally nice people this is all a game. Elderly prisoners of society crying out for help that never comes in nursing home beds; First Nations people being murdered by cops; unemployed people being driven to suicide by a welfare system that prioritizes no one's welfare? These are not games. These are not puzzles. These are not riddles. There is no guessing game where you arrive at the correct clever yet still sensitive slogan to disarm the powers that be.

This isn't charades, where you precociously act out a story of desperate need so the people with a death grip on the levers of power will exclaim, “ Oh! Oh you want us to help!”

There is no making these maggots listen, unless of course you begin by using the formulation “We need to make these maggots listen.”

The only clever word game in town is to work out how to speak the language of power so that it scares the pants off the people in charge.

The reason so many people increasingly find it anxiety inducing to engage in small talk, conversation, discussion, is that most of it doesn’t feel real and a normal person without power or a career or some such motivating bullshit factor can scarcely guess, “Which flavour of bullshit am I supposed to be speaking right now? I can’t guess, therefore, I am having my 800th meltdown .”

It used to be that you got around this problem by keeping yourself busy. You simply provided yourself with lots of things to do. It didn't matter what the things were, anything was enough to keep your rabbit eyes out of the headlights of this terrifying society. Well, society’s scrap heap has grown to include too many people. Too many people are  kept in a state of waiting for the other shoe to drop.

“When will I have a future?”

“When will I have a home?” 

“When will the fear stop?”
 

“Will there ever be any certainty in my life?”

And in that terror space, in that bureaucratic nightmare waiting room, there is all the time in the world to be engulfed by anxieties. Help that never comes is a powerful and frightening form of fascism. These unseen authoritarianisms destroy you and me by stringing us along.

People who tell us to politely wait? Ghost those arseholes.