The black and white brothers

Is a pile of cash handouts a substitute for acknowledging that we have robbed you of your dignity and for coming to love and respect you as people and for genuinely trying to heal the past?

Well actually, the only people who tended to socialise with the Aborigines in droves then, were the down and outs of white society.

And what many despairing Aborigines who came into contact with them learnt was, that the way to ease their pain was, to join in with them to drink themselves to death!

I certainly found this out, when on arrival to Darwin, depressed by my experience with that pair of black and white brothers, I began to pay attention to the findings of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Alcoholism in the Northern Territory in 1973, which was in session at that time. I joined the Northern Australian Aboriginal Legal Service then as a volunteer for six months.

Fast forward to now. Slowly but surely, enough new generation Aborigines eventually have gained the education to be able to lead their people as teachers, doctors, nurses, lawyers, musicians, entrepreneurs and politicians.

And in spite of some racism, that seems to be still persisting in the Australian society, we have come much closer now to the ideal of becoming truer black and white brothers and sisters.

The likes of Charlie Perkins, Adam Goods and Stan Grant, the US Civil Rights Movement, followed by the Black Lives Matter movement now, may have helped us to wake up and be counted!

So as I hear the black Rev. Rafa, a kind of re-incarnation of Martin Luther King and the white practical idealist, Jon Ossoff declare passionately that they are 'black and white brothers' and that they are determined to bring love for all into politics, I can only cry with joy:

'Yes! Maybe, in spite of the still existing shocking divisions and hatreds and perhaps because of them, particularly in the US, the time may have arrived for us all, Black and White, Brown, Yellow and for all shades of humanity, to genuinely do our best, to bring about healing and at long last become one another's brothers and sisters!'

Now that the Reverend and Ossoff won the two Georgian Senate seats and broke the Republican gridlock over Biden in the Senate, it may be time for the Democrats, the Republicans, the whole US and the world, to step up and to support these two remarkable Georgian Senators to ensure that loving public service is confirmed as the lasting foundation for politics.