26/01/2025
Do you think the world should run on luck, or justice/fairness? Take a minute to think about that..
What did you do to deserve, or what choice did you make, to end up with the skin colour you have, to be born in the country you were, to be a particular biological s*x, and with the family that you have? The answer is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING; it was down to pure, dumb luck. So if any of these things have afforded you any level of privilege, please be honest with yourself and acknowledge that you didn't deserve ANY of it; and those who have been disadvantaged by any of these things, well that's not deserved either. It all just happened by pure chance that some are given an unfair advantage, and others an equally unfair disadvantage.
I mention it because this date is one where many seemingly reasonable people feel they have earned the right to say who or what can be called Australian, who deserves to be in this country, and how others should be treated if they want to come here. If you're 40+ and an Anglo-Australian man, remember it's only by dumb luck that you weren't born a woman in a war-torn and impoverished nation elsewhere on this planet. You have in no way earned the right to judge others who weren't as lucky as you.
And most of all, when you live in a country that was founded on the outright lie of Terra Nullius, where our colonial predecessors openly stole the land and murdered it's inhabitants, then continued up until my lifetime to deny First Nations people the right to maintain their culture and language, to raise their own children, to earn a living, to vote- in short, all of the human rights which most of us take for granted, just remember if not for dumb luck it could just as easily be you.
Disadvantage and discrimination isn't just in the past; the affects of the past are ongoing, and the systems and ideas which allow it still exist. No wonder this date is divisive - it's the anniversary of dividing this land into haves and have nots, based purely on the dumb luck of skin colour.
We can't unite as a country until we acknowledge and address the division that exists to this day; only then can we learn from the mistakes of the past.
