What is Corona showing us this week?

What is Corona showing us this week?

“If you look at our prime minister at the moment where he has $270 billion to invest in missiles to displace people, why doesn’t he have billions to house people with dignity and safety? Why isn’t that part of the Covid-19 stimulus package? … here’s your chance to do two things, put billions into social housing, keep Jobseeker at the rate it is now and don’t return people to poverty. Because if you’ve got no way out, if you’ve got no income security and no housing security, that’s how you get those high-rises. They shouldn’t even be there anymore, should they?” Kon Karapanagiotidis, Asylum Seeker Resource Centre commenting on the lockdown in Melbourne’s public housing high-rises on The Briefing podcast, Thursday, 9 July 2020.

If you’re in Australia right now, the Corona situation is starting to feel shaky again. With much of one state on lockdown, many of us are wondering, will it be our turn next? Certainly, in the global scheme of things, Australia has suffered very lightly indeed, so far. Can we continue to be the ‘lucky country’ when it comes to Corona?

At the moment, I sometimes find myself unconsciously holding my breath then unexpectedly sighing it out. It’s a reminder of the stress I’m carrying in my body – a stress I know is not exclusive to me during these unpredictable times.

Some in the spiritual community talk of this as a time of rebalancing the planet and we have a few more years to go yet. When my mind grapples with that concept I feel…challenged…despairing…resolute…hopeful? My feelings shift like the sands on a windy beach.

Then the Universe steps in and sends me a gentle reminder of where I should focus my attention. Today it came through the words of Kon Karapanagiotidis – he was interviewed on The Briefing podcast earlier this week about the public housing lockdown in Victoria. For those of you who don’t know about Kon, he is a community leader who supports and advocates for refugees in Australia. He founded and still runs a charitable, not-for-profit called the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre which is entirely community-funded and has never taken a cent of government money – this is a deliberate strategy to ensure their advocacy remains uncompromised.

I have no doubt that Kon makes many politicians shift uneasily in their well-padded seats. He and his team, along with supporters and partners within the refugee advocacy sector, successfully lobbied for the Medivac Bill which guaranteed people seeking asylum (human beings) transfer to the mainland for medical treatment when assessed and referred by doctors. I still find it gobsmacking that in our ‘lucky country’ we needed a bill to ensure sick people could receive the medical assistance they needed…as instructed by doctors. Equally appalling is the fact the government couldn’t wait to repeal the bill when they had a chance. But let’s face it, even a cursory look at how successive Australian governments (from both sides of the political spectrum) have treated refugees for decades is enough to show just how low politicians will stoop for easy votes and out of sight/out of mind expediency.

I’m sure many politicians would love to dismiss Kon as just another bleeding heart but they couldn’t sustain this argument for long because he is also a well-educated, articulate pragmatist. And that makes him difficult to dismiss or silence.

I wasn’t surprised to hear that he and the ASRC team had stepped in to provide food for the people on hard lockdown in Melbourne’s public housing high-rises. I also wasn’t surprised to hear him encourage people to donate to other local charities for this cause instead of than the ASRC. He feels that supporting the organisations who work with the affected communities in the long-term will have a greater impact. To hear the head of one charity diverting donations to another charity is highly unusual, even in a sector based on giving.

As someone who has long-worked with low socio-economic communities, Kon has used his platform this week to point out one of the issues that Corona has starkly unveiled – the inadequacy of public housing in Victoria. While I don’t live in that state, I don’t doubt the legitimacy of his statements because the evidence seems to indicate he is right.

More broadly, I think Corona is exposing many of the social problems that have been unaddressed for far too long across Australia.

Up in my hometown of Brisbane, a friend says many children from a local school did no work during the last lockdown here – they had no internet at home and their parents either couldn’t get to or couldn’t be bothered to travel to the school to pick up the hard copy work sheets. Some children did no schoolwork for many weeks. This highlights existing socio-economic problems where teachers and schools provide a lifeline for kids who otherwise slip through the cracks. This is not a new problem and reminds me of when they added fluoride to the water here in Brisbane. The government told us it would help prevent rising levels of tooth decay in children and the community. Certainly, over the years, I’ve heard horrific anecdotal stories from dentists who practised in some of the areas most affected. But adding fluoride to the water felt like a bandaid measure. The government added another unnecessary chemical to our water supply instead of addressing the underlying issues of poverty, education and lack of community support.

All these thoughts and many others ran through my head as I listened to Kon’s words and I took away the following Universal message.

When we feel like things are darkest and we don’t know what is coming next, turning our attention to how we can help our communities is one of the most important things we can do. Doing this takes our anxiety and uncertainty and channels it into action to make the world a better place. Find the causes that you feel called to, then find a way to help – donate funds, give your time or increase awareness by talking about the issues on your social media channels. Do whatever you can.

We have a lot of social problems that need to be sorted out. They aren’t new and they aren’t very sexy. But they need to be addressed. Covid-19 and the lockdowns are simply exposing in sharp relief the problems that many were choosing to ignore for too long.

Whatever you are struggling with right now, there is always someone else who is struggling too. Perhaps this time of upheaval is showing us this more clearly so we reach out more often and live more in alignment with that saying, “We’re all in this together”. Our ability to pull together in this way, to make things better for everyone, is what makes us the lucky country.

Bad Habits

Bad HabitsIf I said it will be okay
Would you believe my smiling eyes
Or would you sigh and turn away
Thinking only of the crime
That life has left you responsible for
Your life in seeming tatters
Yet I’m telling you it’s really just fine
Can’t I see what really matters?

Your lover has left
The bank keeps calling
You’re avoiding all of your calls
Your mother’s concerned
Your friends hear your wailing
There’s no break that you can score.

And yet here I am now
Standing right here
I’m telling you it will be fine
Get away from me, you yell
You demented freak
Can’t you see that you’re out of line!

My life is a mess
My life is a mess
The words repeat in your head
But if you looked up
You’d see a glimmer ahead
A reason to get out of bed.

Yet the words they repeat
On and on
Fate tosses you this way and that
But if you look ahead
Instead of always back
You can get yourself on track.

You’re straining so hard with your body it seems
To move oh so fast forward
But your head keeps on turning
And looking backwards
Your heart is constantly turning.

Stop looking back
It’s doing no good
It won’t help you
Where you are going
Although it is hard
Lord, I know that
To proceed without any real knowing
But trust me there is more, waiting ahead
You just need to keep on going.

It will be alright
Things will change
You can make a difference I promise
But you can’t stay where you are now for sure
Can I even help you move on from it
Off this point where the darkness consumes
The breath and hope from your soul

It will be alright
Just keeping moving ahead
Don’t look back anymore
Don’t focus on the shadows
They’re behind you now
There’s a road up ahead to explore.

A future awaits you
It’s better than this
This place where you now inhabit
I promise you truly
Just look up ahead
It’s time to break that bad habit.

Refugees, leaky boats and a loss of compassion

refugeesIt was announced this week that the Australian Government had given $40M in aid to the Cambodian Government, along with $15.5M for the International Office of Migration, to support the refugees our country will send to Cambodia this year for resettlement.*

Yes we (a first-world country) have sent refugees who have sought asylum from us to Cambodia (a third-world country with all its associated financial and social challenges) and we’ve sent along a nice package of money to assuage our collective conscience and make it palatable (kind of).

Meanwhile, in the northern hemisphere, European countries discuss ‘doing something’ about the refugee situation while leaving one country (Italy) to do most of the ‘doing’ and rescue those who are perilously close to drowning in local seas.

And in the last month we’ve watched countries like Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia squabble over who should rescue those floating in leaky boats off their shores; possibly risking the possible loss of life while the discussions were held.

The rhetoric of most of these countries is usually focused on ‘stopping the boats’ or ‘cracking down on people traffickers’. But strangely, not many seem to focus too much on why the people get into the boats in the first place. And some of them are also very quick to suggest those refugees aren’t really genuine anyway. Any suggestion of compassion doesn’t seem to feature much at all.

And so it goes.

I don’t generally use my blog to make political statements but I find in this case, I just couldn’t keep quiet anymore. So tomorrow or the next day I will write again about psychic happenings or self-development. But today, I shall write of something else I feel passionate about – compassion and people who ask for our help.

Refugees, however they come, are asking for our help. They are part of a global phenomenon of displaced people that isn’t going away anytime soon. Refugees (including those who arrive by boat) are generally people who are desperate for a better life. Why else would you put your safety, and that of your family, in the hands of a dodgy bloke with dodgy-looking boat? Rational thought would suggest you need to be pretty desperate to take that action.

Refugees are sometimes the human result of wars the West have instigated over the last few years. Other times they are the result of wars or violent repression we have ignored or felt powerless to act against. As human beings, I believe we have a responsibility in these situations to ensure these displaced people are treated with dignity regardless of how they arrive and what their claim is. However, if half the stories about Australia’s detention centres are to be believed, then I guess we’re failing on that front.

As someone who has worked with refugee communities and heard first-hand some of their stories of survival, I can’t help but feel moved by their plight. I’ve also been inspired by their determination to make a life for themselves and ‘give it a go’ in countries where they are often greeted with suspicion and misplaced judgement.

I’ve watched one family walk down a street where every second ‘local’ person turned and rudely stared because they were so very black (being African) and everyone else there was so very white. I squirmed inside to see it and wondered how the ‘locals’ would feel if the situation was reversed. I also wondered how many of them realised just how hard those parents worked to support their family and keep food on the table.

So now, in Australia particularly, I watch the images flicker across my television screen of desperate people in the middle of the ocean and listen to politicians point fingers and pass on the ‘issue of refugees’ to a third-world country. And I listen to those same politicians (and some members of our media) as they determinedly seek to insidiously make the words ‘illegal arrivals’ part of our vernacular when under international law it is legal to seek asylum whenever you believe your life is in peril.

In a perfect world, people who feared for their lives would assemble in an orderly fashion at a desk somewhere and politely request assistance. They would hand over all their relevant documentation (because they would have had time to collect all the relevant documents before their departure) and their claims would be assessed. Unfortunately, in many places in the world, this is simply not an option because people can’t reach a processing centre in the first place. Other times the thought of spending years in refugee camps in desolate conditions is too hopeless to consider. Some will instead risk everything to give their family a better chance because the alternative has become too awful.

I’m not so naïve that I believe we should simply open our doors and say ‘come on in’ without checks and balances. There needs to be a process to ensure those who seek asylum are genuine and processing needs to be timely (not take years and years as it often seems to now).

But I think we need to remember the meaning of compassion and that it doesn’t just apply to our nearest and dearest. Compassion shouldn’t be applied selectively. When someone asks for our help, regardless of whether their request conforms to our idea of appropriateness, as humans we need to provide assistance. We need to remember our compassion and acknowledge that although someone looks different to us on the surface they are still humans (just like us) underneath. They love, feel pain, bleed and try to do their best, just like us.

We are all responsible for each other. Like it or not, we are part of a global community. And when we forget our compassion for others, when our view becomes so narrow that we find it easier to point the finger, convince ourselves it’s not our problem and then pack people (who have been proven to be genuine refugees) off to a third-world country (with a nice wad of money to salve our conscience) there is something seriously wrong.

I would so like to see our politicians remember what compassion is. I would like them to find a new way to approach this global problem that isn’t based on prejudice and passing the buck. I would like them to acknowledge sometimes people seek our help because they need it and we have an obligation to treat them as human beings deserving of our respect.

Locking them up in off-shore detention centres where rational and well-balanced members of the community such as the Australian Medical Association say the conditions are appalling, is not the answer.

Passing legislation to legally stop journalists and others reporting on the refugee issues and conditions in those centres is also not the answer.

And sending refugees off to a third-world country with enough of its own problems is not acceptable either.

Remember compassion and find a better way. Seriously, I beg you. Find a better way than what we’re doing right now. I know we can.

*Statistics taken from ABC News reports http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-06-04/refugees-from-nauru-detention-centre-arrive-in-cambodia/6521972