Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Social Quality


I've said it before and I'm saying it again. Mothers are among the most controlled, disempowered and despised persons in Australia. Make them single, and you compound the problems they face. Rafts of professionals (our priests) gather around single mother struggles, and pick at the bones. When they are done and the children are grown and not of 'orderly mind', we'll blame the single mothers. Because psychologists will tell us so. All of this requires a compliant media, sympathetic toward the plight of the father and always ready to disregard the death cry of the mother.

If there is one thing we need to be completely clear about it is this. These single mothers, however they came to the station, are persons. The way the society behaves toward those persons indicates the quality of society/democracy we inhabit. If we want the society to be improved, we will need to improve our attitudes/actions toward those persons. That's not my idea, it came from philosophers writing of democracy thousands of years ago. It came from Christ. It came from Ghandi.

I think that as a society, we are what we do to the least powerful among us. Single mothers are among the least powerful, being so unfree they cannot choose where they will live, whether they will be free to work and where their children will school. They cannot even choose whether or not they can access family support networks. These, we control/handle/manage. Typing this, my insides shrink with horror from it. Will the younger cohorts of the next generations change this? Is this signification of a gradual diminishing of the civilisation? Have we become convinced by managerialist leaders that managing one another is more vital than freedom? We will see.