‘Thus passes the glory of the world’, or for Australians, there you go Gloria! Trevor Hardie’s comprehensive letter to the editor poses the uncongenial question, “Do we get what we deserve?” On the occasion of De Stefani quitting Tenterfield Council, I wrote a letter to the editor of the Free Times which was disregarded for the reason, I suppose, that I posed the same question in more uncongenial terms. I admit that at the time I was somewhat relieved that it wasn’t printed. I preface this entire letter with the admission that I realise that not many people have the time, if they have the inclination to examine the intuitions to which they have grown accustomed.
What I mean is that Australians don’t want to know, and all levels of Government have degenerated so much that it is all beyond salvage. In the years following the American Civil War, the poet of democracy Walt Whitman, diagnosed the deep disease of American life as hollow-heartedness.
At the end of his life in the 1880s, this American Moses made these remarks – “I consider the Soaves of Graes, now completed to the full extent of its opportunities and powers, as my definitive’s carte – visible to the coming generation of the new world. That I have not received the acceptance of my own times, but have fallen back on fond hopes for the future, am all probably no more than I ought to have expected.” In other words “hope for the future” was all dared to have circa 1880.
Translated to our own times, presumably he would have no hope at all. In still other words, Whitman knew in 1880 what we are all dimly receiving now, belatedly and whether consciously or subconsciously that is: That democracy is never an achievement or actuality but a beautiful and pathetic transcendent dream. Luck is the pains and knowledge of the great artist which in his particular case resulted in paralytic stroke in his early middle-age.
His compatriot Abraham Lincoln realised the same, and according to legend, he had to be physically restrained from suicide on more than one occasion. The Greek Aristotle wrote thousands of years ago that the progressional order of human Government is agrarian feudalism, spurious democracy and dictatorship. Progress indeed! Remember all the referenda on the fluoride issue for just one small example. If we lack the depth that breeds discrimination and the discrimination that breeds courage.
Courage incorporates another quality which may be described as responsibility to issues of weight and importance and the preparedness in any confusion, to sacrifice the smaller thing to the greater. Unfortunately this deep responsible sense seems to be alien to the spirit of this land or our perception of it – and not only this land, all spurious democracy alike. Trevor Hardie wrote a good letter with a number of positive points and solutions that ought to be responded to.
But in this town in particular, the combination of old comparative values that refer to a century ago; the belief in too many Australians that is unmanly or unseemly to take anything seriously, the depression of the whole rural sector with its cycle of flood, drought, fire and uncertain markets and local Government run by centralised State level and up to the third generation of people in some cases at social security subsistence level and used to it and all above-mentioned levels not desirous of any change unite to frustrate any individual party no matter how eloquent, impassioned, painstaking or sincere. Without capitulating entirely to fundamental Christianity, perhaps all we can hope for is an act of a merciful interventionist God. But that forlorn hope, ever frustrated, can lead to nihilism, despair and ignorance of the shallow extrovert, democratic kind. Fundamental Christians will say it can lead to divine, long suffering patience. It is recorded that the visage of Abraham Lincoln after assassination radiated indescribable unearthly peace.
John Spilsbury
