(worst so far)
due to the fact that there's like 2 articles
from the paper that've been included..
For the last few days
i guess the title sorta sums up
what i've been thinking of the last few-ish days
meanwhilst lina's been wondering
why i wont rite in full paras
the multitude of dots tho
if the text started moving
it mite slighly seem like some hypnotic illusion
Illusions..
Don't you love the those mirrors in those amusement parks?
like i the house of mirrors?
yep i know that you know what im talking about
tho cant really say that their illusions..
more of disortions?
but anyways
when you look into a mirror it just reminds me
makes me think of reflections
(mind you this is coming from someone who
rarely looks into mirrors in the standard day
they're sorta more like objects in the house
you walk past and ignore
hmmm.. could be why i look at my reflection
in windows on the street? maybe? :S)
hmm funny that.. ive yet one to publish..
but anyways..
with the curved mirrors everyone knows that you see a distortion
yet when you look into a plain mirror you just think that what
you see is what is really there..
well ok.. it is what with it turing out to be
the upright, unskewered and same size
but its back to front
and well if you angle a mirror over
you see different things instead of your reflection
sorta like those seeing things in those submarines?
im getting more and more lost for words by the day
due to lack of school..
what ever little vocab i had to start with
has totally diminished..
anyways
back to the mirrors..
so what you see reflected.
sorta like when you look back on yourself
you can see different things
when you look and think back and
when the mirrors tilted all you could possibly see
is some totally pessimistic view of what your life has been
or could just be the idealistic view of what you think others see
something that's totally unrealistic
or
you could just be the realistic one
self analysing and
know what you're like and understand yourself pretty well
and the reflection you see is pretty much the same
and yet.. despite that
its horizontally inverted (yay physics! not)
so there are those discrepancies that are there
but its pretty much down pat
when you "reflect" what you see..
everyone has their past
or their features that they dislike
it makes you sqirm or just feel a plain dislike
but its part of what's formed who you are
or more of what you see as yourself
and yet..
over time what you see changes
everyone grows up..
well not exactly..
more of everyone changes all the time
a slight accident and you're reflection
could be completely different
or something arranged to be done
(hehe.. wisdom teethe removal
AND eye thingy in the same hols?!)
events occur and what you see for that moment may change
and visiting the amusement parks?
its a sudden distortion
and you're reflection's entirely twisted and bent
so as you "age" your "reflection" changes
how you see yourself and how you think others see you
but what you see reflecting back one moment that was once there
might not be some time later
just like memories that fade
they either stay or they change to something else
i've said before that there's nothing time can't heal
just that the degree of healing varies
whether physical or the emotional or other..
but sometimes wounds get reopened
and relapses do occur.
and on that i think im totally offtrack
from my intentional first point which relates to reflections
-
in the last few days, what with work and all..
i found the opinions section and the letters to the editor
is pretty interesting..
mind you once again.. we dont usually get newspaper at home
other than the community one of which most of the time
i dont bother opening them anyways
and for why they're interesing?
and well on Aust day..
typing these articles out
sitting here i can stilll hear the shouts of
"Aussie! Aussie! Aussie! Oi! Oi! Oi!"
eminating through my window from the neighbours house
i guess the two articles below from the opinion section
of the West on Tuesday sorta well its slightly relavent..
- Flags are meant to be flown, not worn -
Paul Murray
Flags, like all powerful symbols, can be troublesome. Just look at the swastika. More than 60 years after Hitler there are regular moves within the European Union to ban it. And the last time that push raisted its head, it was met with calls to ban the hammer and sickle as well.
For some reason the Rising Sun flag with the radiating red arms makes me feel uncomfortable. The emblematic nature of a flag can make it a rallying call for a range of passionate issues not overtly described within its borders.
One of the continuing controversies between Greece and the Republic of Macedonia is over the symbol called the Star of Vergina, rediscovered by archeologists in 1977. Both countries claim it as their link to Alexander the Great and his father, King Phillip. So that dispute dates back to 336BC at least.
Our flag is much newer, but it can be just as potent. Many of those who provoked the first incidents in the Cronulla race riots on December 11,2005, were draped in the national flag. They proved the aphorism that patriotism - misplaced - is the last refuge of the scoundrel.
Prime Minister John Howard does not oppose the burning of the national flag as legitimate form of protest, but he was put on the spot about using it as provocative symbol in an exchange with Ellen Fanning on Channel 9's A Current Affair the day after the riots.Fanning: "Part of what was chilling yesterday was seeing a lot of people in between the violence doing things that you'd see at the cricket, singing 'Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi, Oi, Oi', wrapping themselves in the Australian Flag. What do you say to people who use the Australian Flag in that way?"
Mr Howard: "Look, I would never condemn people for being proud of the Australian flag. I don't care - I would never condemn people for being proud."
Fanning: "What if they've got a beer in one hand and a baseball bat in the other?"
Mr Howard: "Now hang on. What I condemn is loutish behaviour, criminal behaviour, and what should happen, is, the people who committed crimes yesterday should be caught, if possible, and punished."
Fears of a similar outbreak have led the organisers of a Big Day Out concert in Sydney this week to make it known that the flag is unwelcome after a series of racist incidents last year.
"The Australian flag was being used as gang colours," event organiser Ken West said, "It was racism disguised as patriotism and I'm not going to tolerate it." Fresh in his mind also was the clash between young Australians of Serbian and Croatian extraction - some draped in those national flags - clashing at the Australian Open tennis last week.
The bottom line is that flags were not meant to be worn. When a flag is removed froma proper place of respect it becomes open to misuse. It wasn't Pauline Hanson's maiden speech that alerted me to the pernicious nature of her politics. It was when I first saw her wrapped in the flag.
Athletes now regularly drape a flag over themselves for a victory lap. All of this leads to the situation where the flag's power is harnessed for an individual's own purposes.
If we had proper civics education in our schools we might have a chance of teaching people about the correct use of our national symbols. We legislatively protect the name ANZAC from misuse, but there is no such protection for the flag.
Asking that the flag used as it was intended is not un-Australian, but quite the opposite. The Big Day Out concert is not an Australia Day concert. It is not even being held on Australia Day. That said, any suggestion of banning our flag from the public place is provocative and unworkable.
However, politicians and the RSL would do well to start talking about true respect for the flag instead of joining the jingoistic chorus.
- Big Day Out in a True Blue Flap -
Gerard Henderson
Director of The Sydney Institute.
Talk about backing a loser.
The organisers of the Big Day Out concert in Sydney on Thursday were on a hiding to nothing when they indicated that the Australian flag would not be welcome at the Sydney gig but would be welcome when the event travels to other cities (including Perth on February 4).
The reaction was so predictable that it should have been predicted by the Big Day Out team.
John Howard condemned the decision on Sunday and yesterday Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd weighed into the debate by describing it as "political correctness gone mad".
NSW Premier Morris Iemma and Opposition Leader Peter Debnam joined in the chorus.
In recent years there seems to have been a surge of patriotism in Australia, especially among the young. This whould be distinguished from nationalism, which usually has an ideological connotation.
Patriotism essentially involved citizents of a nation feeling good about their society. As such, patriotism is almost always a healthy phenomenon. In Australia it has been associated with both the waving and the wearing of the Australian flag.
It's true that, on occasions, the flag has been associated with acts of intolerance. But these are exceptions since Australia is a remarkably tolerant and accepting society.
The statistics tell the story. In Australia ethnically motivated crime is relatively low and inter-marriage between virtually all groups in our multicultural society is relatively high.
Australia Day has become an occasion when citizens celebrate the nation's success. No doubt, the feel-good factor has been propelled in recent years by the fact that Australia has experienced some 15 years of economic growth and the unemployment rate has more than halved in this process.
In other words, there are plenty of reasons to feel good.
In spite of this, a sense of alienation still prevails in the land. This phenomenon is rarely found among the less well-off groups in the community but abounds within the sections of the financially comfortable intelligentsia - humanities department academics, writers, artists, journalists and so on.
At the moment there is a tendency among sections of the intelligentsia to declare that Australia is intolerant, even racist, society and that Australians are inherently unhappy despite their relative economic wellbeing.
What's more, the suggestion is that Australians are not smart enough to know just how suppressed and unhappy they really are.
If anyone is in any doubt about just how foolish we all are, turn to the month of February in Michael Leunig's 2007 Calendar. There the cartoonist depicts a man on a soapbox smugly proclaiming that "you only need to fool a majority of people for one day every few years - and you've got a democracy!"
The statement is appreciated by the audience, who welcome the pronouncement with the fascist salute. Get it? We're all too foolish to know that we have been manipulated into believing we live in a democracy when, in fact, we reside in some kind of dictatorship.
There are many variations on this theme. Writing in The Age on September 9 last year, playwright Stephen Sewell proclaimed that "it is difficult, contemplating contemporary events, not to despair of the human adventure" and alleged that we have all failed in "the civilising of our own barbarous spirit". Sewell claims that "the real source of hope in any society is the artist" and regrets that artists like him are "being replaced by hacks, drones, spin doctors and media manipulators as the generators and regurgitators of an official culture".
Shame, eh? Even so, the artist still makes a living in the taxpayer-subsidised theatre industry. So life can't be so bad, surely?
A year ago, Wollongong University humanities academic Peter Kell claimed that "an ugly, racist version of Australian nationalism is alive and well" in Sydney and referred to contemporary Australia's "bigoted, intolerant and selfish attitudes" in a nation that has "broken apart". He implied some of these problems might be abated if the Commonwealth Government spent more money on universities and, of course, humanities departments.
In his 2006 Stephen Murray-Smith Lecture, author and journalist Martin Flanagan referred to Australia as a country "afflicted with blindness that needs repair", detected "weird things in our national psyche" and referred to "the awful despair that now lies at the heart of our nation".
In The Guardian last Friday, the leftist journalist John Pilger wrote about the "regression" of Australia's "social democracy into a state of fabricated fear and xenophobia" which should be "an object lesson for all societies claiming to be free".
Novelist Frank Moorhouse presents a much more measured critique of Australia in his essay in the September 2006 issue of teh Griffith Review.
He criticises his colleagues who present "an unwillingness to believe that Australia is seriously threatened by terrorism" and he describes the use of the term fascism as "one of the most carelessly used political expressions in Australia".
Even so, Moorhouse believes that the Commonwealth and State anti-terror laws mean that "the Government will probably have to send some of us to jail" just because he and his fellow artists "speak their minds". An unlikely prediction.
THe fact is, as Sewell knows, the Government is not that interested in what artists say. Rather, it is focused on what real terrorists might do.
Australia Day, once again, is likely to prove the doomsaying members of the intelligentsia wrong. Increasingly January 26 is coming to depict the success of multicultural Australia.
The problem is that some alienated intellectuals continually project their personal unhappiness with Australian society on the overwhelming majority of the citizens who rejoice in their citizenship.
It is likely that Australians will continue to put out more flags irrespective of the Big Day Out.
Interesting huh?
the flag and apparent patriotism..
i guess the main reasons for the compulsion
to put them on the blog
is the fact that it feels relavent to thoughts ive had before
the fact that there's the apparent multiculturalism
and at the same time sometiems slights of the whole racism thing
like you cant reject the whole idea that aust is multicultural
but at the same time you cant say that everyone is entirely accepting
the majority is that everyone is friendly
but there will always be times taht for some reason or the other
and well the other person on the receiving end can take it as they like
on the flag
the thing is that i sort of do agree.
with the title of the first article
"flags should be flown not worn"
not that im against the flag being printed on shirts
but more of the whole flags being tied around shoulders
im not totally AGAINST it..
its tolerable but something that shouldnt really be done
is how i see it i guess
i dunno i just see it as something thats
pretty much disrespectful..
the fact that under that flag many people had died
to serve the country and yet..
the flag is wrapped around the people
and other times
being turned to items of clothing
such as flags sewn together to make tops/skirts/sarongs
and even the aust flag print as a bikini
like a flag printed on a t-shirt is ok
and yeah people are proud bout being aust
that's understandable
i'm proud too
just that i wouldnt actually wear it in such a way
and well the fact that it occurs
i could just push the blame
as one does :P
and just say that people cant see the significance in it
or they do and well just dont feel
the need to respect it the same way in which i do
everyone to their own
but you can also blame on the lack of knowledge
not knowing due to not being taught
it doesnt just represent a country that you live in
it represents all those who've died in war
and the history of the place
values n beliefs.. and im rambling on that..
i guess in a way i can say that i've been lucky
to have actually gotten the chance
to learn what i've learnt
getting a pretty good education to from what i hear
of other students and their memories of primary school
or just that those individuals forgot how primary school was
but
i remember in preprimary..
one of the earliest things i learnt
was the words to the australian anthem
we had a class where every afternoon we learnt one line
repeating it over and over and over and over
and the lines we'd learnt previously
until we'd memorised every line up until where we'd learnt
and then going home everyday
proudly reciting to mum what i'd learnt that day
the new line and what each word had meant
the entire meaning of the anthem
well the first of the five verses that is
and yet
you hear on the radio these days
people wondering what the word "girt" means
or that they dont know the full words
to the first verse of the aust anthem
and yet there's those who run around with the pride
and yet lack of knowledge
im surprised
and its not like the resources arent out there
the fact that ive even seen a BOOK
with pix and all showing the aust anthem
and explainign the meanings of the lines
in the CHILDRENS library
so why dont people know?
they just werent taught in primary school like i did??
so i guess im lucky i know the first two verses now dont i?
and yet..
i wonder how i could be labelled
as someone who doesnt love my home country?
ah well..
just cos i say its boring dont mean i dont love it :D
just isnt that much stuff around to do..
and the flag?
i remember as a primary school student
in year three the first day of school
was that instead of being
introduced to all the ways of the year
we were each handed out a copy of the Australian Flag
and were told to colour it in..
nope no hard work..
just colouring in a flag
i looked at it and recognised it
but i didnt understand they were there fore
and yep
in that afternoon we had the explaination
of what the union jack, the southern cross
and federation star were and meant
and yet im surprised that recently
i was asked by someone a few years younger than me
that means highschool student yeah?
bout how the 5 starts relates to the states and terrortories
AGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
they got the southern cross mixed up with the fed star !!
-.-
*sigh*
how can you not know how the flag works??
anyways...
despite my amazement
i was even more amazed to hear that a friend
was learning which oceans were where again
good thing she was refreshing her memory
but then i realised when i asked her
that she'd never actually learning
DESPITE the fact that
i had to memorise them in primary school
AND you needed to know where they were for
YEAR EIGHT geog
i had to know htem in year FIVE
a GRADUATE from HIGHSCHOOL
didnt know what the oceans were or where they were.
what the HELL is wrong with people's learning?
she claimed to have spent year SEVEN playing with playdough
for science
*sigh*
i had crappy science teacher in year seven
never actually get to do the experiments
but we still had to do the write ups
so what the heck??
is there such a god damned difference
in the primary school standards???
oh and before you say anything
to even out the odds of the possible
private vs. public education clash
its clarified i graduated a public primary school
so why?? why such wide standard differences?
i dont understand that
and it primary school..
you raise the flag
have the roster duty for bell ringing
you have the class camps
you should also have the general basic knowledge
of your country's own anthem and flag
that is if you're proud to be a citizen
not spending the time sewing flags together
to make garments
just for a single event where there's tendency
for people to binge drink.
celebrate yes.. but reasonably please??
of which today (Sat 27th)
found an amusing cartoon in the paper..
couldnt resist ^^
since lina's complaining on the size of my post
and the fact that im typing this is restricting her convo
and use of the keyboard i shall stop
ok
nite nite
*hugs*
-Del
