“It’s always too soon to go home. And it’s always too soon to calculate effect. I once read an anecdote by someone in Women Strike for Peace (WSP), the first great antinuclear movement in the United States, the one that did contribute to a major victory: the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty, which brought about the end of aboveground testing of nuclear weapons and of much of the radioactive fallout that was showing up in mother’s milk and baby teeth. (And WSP contributed to the fall of the House Un-American Activities Committee [HUAC], the Department of Homeland Security of its day. Positioning themselves as housewives and using humor as their weapon, they made HUAC’s anticommunist interrogations ridiculous.) The woman from WSP told of how foolish and futile she felt standing in the rain one morning protesting at the Kennedy White House. Years later she heard Dr. Benjamin Spock – who had become one of the most high-profile activists on the issue – say that the turning point for him was spotting a small group of women standing in the rain, protesting at the White House. If they were so passionately committed, he thought, he should give the issue more consideration himself.
“Cause-and-effect assumes history marches forward, but history is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension. Sometimes one person inspires a movement, or her words do decades later; sometimes a few passionate people change the world; sometimes they start a mass movement and millions do; sometimes those millions are stirred by the same outrage or the same ideal, and change comes upon us like a change of weather. All that these transformations have in common is that they begin in the imagination, in hope. To hope is to gamble. It’s to bet on the future, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty is better than gloom and safety. To hope is dangerous, and yet it is the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk.”
Rebecca Solnit Hope In The Dark
Now I know that not everyone agrees with everything I say. Of course that doesn’t make them automatically wrong… I mean I have been known to admit that I was misinformed and that, after listening to their solid arguments, I have come to understand that I have been a victim of the propaganda of the mainstream media.
Take, for example, Matt Canavan’s contribution to the looming storm… I call it a storm because some in the media have been calling it a cyclone but after reading the comments on Matty’s post, I have come to understand that it is nothing to worry about… And Matt himself, scribbled all over the map in red, reminding us all that there have been so many cyclones in Queensland in the past century that he didn’t even have to remember to colour between the lines.
Of course, this is one time I truly hope that I was wrong to believe that it was a cyclone and somehow a serious threat but I guess we’ll see. I actually hope that those people who assured me that it was just a storm and no big deal turn out to be right.
The ABC ran a very important story yesterday about how this weather event might delay the Prime Minister’s election call which, as I predicted a few weeks ago, will be on April 12th. Like all those saying that Mr Albanese will be going to visit the Governor-General any day, I was absolutely right… unless he doesn’t go, in which case, I was still right and it’s only the fact that he didn’t do what I predicted that makes the date wrong. Of course, if the cyclone changes course and nothing happens then we’ll see an April election, unless it’s in May.
That’s the great thing about predictions. You can always claim that you were right, except for a few things which led to your prediction being wrong, but apart from the inaccuracies caused by events that were outside your prediction, the rest was completely correct.
Anyway, the opinion polls look dire for Labor… Of course, when I say that, I do have to remember that opinion polls – like many predictions – have a history of being completely correct apart from the bits that they get wrong… 1993, for example, and 2019, for example and…
Let’s be quite clear. Opinion polls admit that they have a margin of error of plus or minus three percent which means that nearly every election in the past fifty years could have gone to either major party and the poll would still be within the margin of error.
As we get closer to the election, I’m predicting that the margin will tighten and it’ll be a very tight election… Unless one party does something silly… Or rather, something sillier than electing Peter Dutton as leader.
While I am frustrated with the way the mainstream media reports politics as though it’s a sporting contest and the main thing is who wins, rather than a serious look at the implications of the various policies, I am aware that there are plenty of alternative viewpoints out there which offer a range of excellent analyses: Ronni Salt, Tim Dunlop, Rick Morton and various others, apart from this site all present intelligent viewpoints on the important issues. If you read something on social media, it’s great if you click like, but reposting helps spread the word.
It only takes a click and you’re click might mean it reaches a much larger audience.
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