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Political killjoys smother hope, idealism and a vibrant democracy

By Gwynn MacCarrick - posted Friday, 22 August 2003


I'd like to believe it is because the human heart yearns for the extraordinary and will not surrender to vacuous discourse however clothed, disguised, rarefied and wrapped in the language of truth. I would like to believe that we resist limits on language because we know that discourse defines our reality and the limits of our world.

Cynics advise us not to hope this side of the grave, and yet history teaches that hope denied does not dissipate, it simply goes underground.

We hope on principle, we hope tactically and strategically, we hope because the future is uncertain, we hope because it's a more powerful and more joyful way to live.

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In the same way that a finch on a summer's day with no natural enemy will sing to its heart's content but in the presence of a goshawk will mute its appreciation of life, a full-throated and confident disquiet represents a optimistic democracy.

Conversely, a smug political outlook that views human exchange in terms of utility without humanity loses spirit and meaning. This outlook acquiesces to a political landscape resembling a theme park for marketable rhetoric, which is paraded in moments of ceremony to provide distraction from the naked struggle for natural ascendency. Such a society has no sense of connection.

But perhaps the pragmatists ought not draw too much comfort from our silent citizenship in Australia presently. There are other explanations for our subdued state beside a carte blanche acceptance of their chained and blinkered outlook. It is conceivable that both young and old are more astute than they are credited for.

Silence may have many meanings.

Perhaps we are merely drawing breath and regrouping amid the frenetic and disorienting pace of information and issues.

Perhaps we have opted for the escapism of reality TV, or slipped out to the pub for a quite one, in a muted act of rebellion aimed at preserving the human spirit.

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Perhaps we have disengaged because in silence we resist an unambitious politic that lowers the guide pole to suit the standard of moral midgets.

Perhaps we, the enlightened, have adopted a bunker mentality, tacitly refusing to rule out the possibility that living an ideal is an impossibility.

Perhaps we abhor a society that dampens and extinguishes the light burning in our youths before their embryonic aspirations find oxygen, so we burn a candle in the window instead.

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About the Author

Gwynn MacCarrick is an international criminal law and environmental law expert. She is a Research Fellow with the Policy Innovation Hub, Griffith University and adjunct researcher with James Cook University. She has a BA (Hons) LLB Grad Cert Leg Prac. IDHA., Grad Cert Higher Ed., PhD.

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