"If you don't know about it, don't worry about it."
And this man will soon be our Prime Minister? Is he saying, "Don't make an informed decision"?
It would seem he is. His comment apparently specifically concerned something known as "franking credits" but it would also appear to apply to many other things. He is not telling us what we need to know.
We simply aren't being told enough and, when we are told things, they are all too often completely wrong. That's wrong.
There was a news item last night which showed students protesting about climate change. They had taken time off school again to do it as they had once before. One of the girls was in tears. She looked about thirteen or fourteen - that age when everything from breaking the tip on your pencil or breaking up with your best friend seems like a major tragedy. These students, and some much younger than that, have obviously been scared witless about climate change. They were spouting things like, "we've only got twelve years" and "what's the point of going to school if we haven't got a world to live in?"
I remember T... across the road coming home from day care in tears because "all the animals are going to die". He was four at the time.
What on earth is going on?
Of course we need people to be educated about issues but they need to be educated with facts and they need, at very least, to have positive courses of action presented to them. Protesting in the way the students were doing it is not positive. It might get the adrenalin going for an hour or two but long term action is hard work.
I know. I've been there. I spent years of my life working towards something that I believed would make a difference. I believe it did make a difference and that it will go on making a difference. It has actually helped those young people protesting throughout the world.
But they have to work out ways to make a difference too - and that will mean changing their life styles and maintaining those changes. That is as hard as sticking to a diet to lose weight. It's a life time thing.
When the Opposition Leader says "if you don't know about it don't worry about it" he is really saying, "Give us the power to manipulate you into doing what we want while you remain ignorant."
That worries me.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
3 comments:
I was expecting my first baby, and was seriously concerned that it had been a bad decision to have a baby at all. We were suddenly being told by the climate experts that we were in the first stages of the next ice age, and would be feeling the effects seriously within the next decade. And we would not have much fuel to help us survive, since the entire world had only got twenty years of oil reserves and then we would have to shut down civilisation.
She turned forty last month.
So that was a bit of good prediction.
So how do these schoolchildren know what they say they know, when the experts are so wide of the mark so often.
What the children have been told by the people in charge is criminal. They should be taught how to research information, not just believe everything they are told.
I have lived long enough to be severely sceptical of a lot of what we are told. . I adopt the attitude of a well known current affairs interviewer (now retired) used. The question was, when speaking to our sainted political leaders, "What lies is this lying bastard telling me now?"
Post a Comment