Hangover Blues
As the curtain falls on another election, the lying games, showmanship and slander of the previous weeks has fallen almost silent. The band plays the ‘hangover blues’ on post mortem instruments, throwing blame, public ‘Mea culpa’ and the ‘I am great, I have won’ version, as the music finally and thankfully begins to flatten out. Having left behind the usual expert engineered, agenda driven forward estimates turned false predictions, we slowly return to normality. What is normality? It means ‘conforming to a standard’, ‘regular’, ‘the usual’. It doesn’t determine right from wrong, good from bad, useful from wasteful etc. In doing what we usually do, being normal, doing what we are familiar with and confident in and with anxiety levels low, logically we should feel comfortable as a society. But in normality it is prudent to pay attention to what’s behind the smoke screen, for normality may harbour sinister intentions. Let’s cultivate awareness of the reality that the political theatre is heavily dominated and dictated by big business and other interest groups, the media, and heavily infiltrated by self-gratifying religious cults. Let’s judge those who govern us by merit, not by promises, policies and arguments without substance. Don’t fall for the hype they create but stand up for truth. Let not popularity deceive us. Henry Lawson wrote about the popular guy in town: “were he intelligent he wouldn’t be popular”.