The New Year is over and the Easter Eggs and Hot Cross Buns are already out. Our Christmas consumption is fast being encouraged to become Easter Consumption – with a short detour into Valentines Day spending just to keep the wheels of capitalism spinning.
All of this as we ascend the Ladder of Opportunity whilst keeping our minds firmly fixed on the threat of terror, WMDs and interest rate rises. No wonder so many of us are depressed, stressed or just very tired.
The statistics tell us we spent more on Christmas cheer than ever this last year and the stats also tell us our housing boom is about to go bust. We’re told to spend to help the economy grow but in the next breath the same highly compensated financial advisors tell us to save for our retirement. All the while high flying corporate types get more for being sacked for NOT doing their job than most of us will see in our lifetimes.
And on and on and on and on it goes. A never ending cycle of contradictory ‘facts’ circulating, gaining prominence, fading into the background or just disappearing up their own derriére.
And some of us expect our politicians to be honest? Well, if I ever reach the top of the great ladder currently being constructed within our society, I guess we will be able to discuss it from our mutually amenable vantage point. However, there is one thing I’ve noticed about ladders, they’re usually only one person wide and everyone goes up and down in single file. OK, that’s two but who’s counting?
I’ve argued for quite some time that Labor is really just Liberal lite and after last weeks performance I must say nothing that came out of Darling Harbour has changed my mind. So long as the focus of political rhetoric and the policy platforms put forward remain on individual achievement over co-operative effort and the promise of grandeur as part of the "view from the top", nothing will change.
The greatest measure of a society is not the amount it spends on goods and services, yet that is exactly how we hear the greatness of nations described. The "strongest", the "thriving", the "growing" "economies" are what we hear described as if they are living, breathing entities quite distinct from the citizens therein. Most of the time the descriptions of the "economy" are done in parallel with something called "democracy" in a way that conflates the two terms as if they are synonymous.
I am yet to hear on any newscast a presentation of an index that measures the success of a society by the number of hours spent caring for the infirm. Or about the numbers of newly poor, those whose income has fallen below the poverty line – which to my way of thinking is a real national shame far more important than losing a sporting match. All we get are the Dow, The Hang Seng or the NASDAC which really only measure abstractions and theoretic values not the material conditions of our communities and the living conditions of our brothers and sisters.
While many of us spent summer basking in the sun (and wasn’t it good this year) many of our brothers and sisters spent their festive season mourning a past they knew and fearing a future of the unknown and uncertain.
However, if we are to believe our hopeful political masters, there is hope on the horizon. A new day will dawn, they tell us. One in which any of us can climb the Ladder of Opportunity (notice how the acronym spells LOO) and, at last, get to view the world from the top.
I guess if that fails we can at least climb high enough to look over the fence and finally understand that the grass on the other side is, quite often, manicured by an underpaid, overworked sucker, just like us.