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.
