Tag / apathy

by jsetc

Bored stiff humanity

My eyes wince with boredom at the news again today. A bird trapped inside a cage drawn by a juvenile asylum seeker in detention adjacent to a report of a mother who died during childbirth in detention. Oh no sorry, that was last year. This year it’s a formulated table of the data collected, complied from the findings found about the juveniles in detention centres (who also drew pictures). The phone rings and I’m zapped into another place. There’s a crisis at work and I need to come in as soon as I can. I am me but I could just as easily be you. I get inside my car and by the time I arrive at the place I’m going to my mind has been adequately numbed by the inane chatter on the radio, my thoughts scattered across the world by various lyrics on the selected playlist. Asylum seekers? Where? Not here. I have forgotten what you were talking about. Bring it up again in a few months’ time on my Facebook feed and I’ll have another look.

I once came home to find a Somali woman and her family squatting in my flat. My bleeding-hearted flat mate had given them the keys and told them to make themselves at home. By the time I arrived every single cushion and mattress had been put on the floor in the living room and placed against the skirting boards to form a circle.  The middle of the circle was filled with every single pot in my kitchen. Some of the pots had food in them and others had been turned into food waste bins. The smell that pervaded was untraceable in my recent memory yet it rekindled times tucked deep away in my collective unconscious and somehow made me feel alive.  After an explanatory phone call from my flat mate I learned that the woman and her family had been asylum seekers, that her daughter was born in detention and that she had spent three years at the Maribyrnong facility.  Wow, I thought to myself. We are good people. We care. We make an effort. We go out of our way. We read the news and get angered by it. We stand up and protest. We sign petitions and write newspaper articles. We encourage others to question.  We drive asylum seekers to doctors’ appointments. We do a lot.

A few weeks later I found myself inside a detention centre for the first time in my life. I was only allowed into the reception area. My flatmate had become a regular visitor of asylum seekers so people smiled politely at us as we waited. Once our assigned asylum seekers arrived we were allowed to sit with them for half an hour. We could chat, play games and share food after our parcels had been scanned by security. Then we were told to leave. Each visit added to the growing collection of pictures drawn by some of the children inside the detention centre that my flatmate started gathering. I can do something with these she thought aloud.  If people see these, they’ll do something. They’ll cry. They’ll be disturbed. They’ll sit up and start demanding answers. That was in 1998. In Melbourne, Australia.

Those pictures became a whole ‘government’ inquiry, leading to hours of interviews, research, analysis, examination of the system, involving many whose names have now become well respected and household when it comes to this topic. The drawings were published – trickle by trickle. And people sighed, cried, frowned and looked aghast. People questioned, wondered and grew frustrated.  Then they woke up and got dressed for work, school, university and kindergarten. And the pictures kept piling up together with all the reports and files and inquiries into inquiries. Every so often a few pictures would be released into the public again and people would see them and say ‘oh no!’ and ‘oh how shocking!’ and ‘how sad!’ Then a little while later a few more pictures would slip out and people would see them and say ‘oh, yeah…I’ve seen that before. It’s awful.’ And then after a while someone would decide to publish a couple more dusty pictures drawn by children in detention centres and people would see them and say nothing at all. That was a few years after 1998.

Today there is BREAKING NEWS about pictures drawn by children in detention centres. But I’m already fast asleep. How can I admit that? You ask with disgust. How can I be so apathetic? You wonder.  When was the last time you checked how many official submissions there have been on the topic of asylum seekers over the past fifteen years? I have come to realise that  my apathy is a result of watching the well-rehearsed play of media, politics and tactful spin that churns out images and by-lines at its discretion and then presses auto-repeat until we have seen the same sight ad nauseam to the point that it sends us unconscious because we begin to feel the heavy weight of the fact that nothing will ever change. And how can I tackle that problem? It is so vast I cannot even see where it begins let alone where it may one day end.

I am not sure what sickens me more – the whines and groans of people who keep repeating ‘how terrible!’ and ‘how wrong!’ or the excruciating silence of the people who don’t even pretend to care. And as the world turns each day, growing more and more toxic, the resultant apathy is the malaise that keeps it there.

I still have snippets of newspaper articles gathered over time about this topic I was introduced to so many years ago. I recall an article by a well-known Australian author who has taken a vested interest in the subject of children in detention in Australia. As I read through this now old news clip I realise that one of the children he talks about is the same little girl I used to visit with my flatmate:

“I first met the girls in the centre in January 2001. They had already been there for 15 months. Among the horrors they had endured was glimpsing the body of a detainee lying in a pool of blood on a basketball court. He had jumped to his death from the hoop after an eight-hour stand-off with centre guards. Days earlier, a 17-year-old asylum seeker had attempted suicide. He could be seen pacing the courtyard with strips of bandage plastered on his throat. ” (The Age, July 17 2010)

Three words stick in my head  –  ‘17-year-old’. What constitutes a child? Does it make any difference that this boy was 17 years old? His data would not have made it into one of the countless submissions about children in detention but perhaps it appeared in a different report, or inquiry. And if it did, what difference was made, I ask myself. The author mentioned above hasn’t tired of his pursuit, so why have I?

As I skim further down the text I feel goose bumps forming. Suddenly I read my flatmate’s name. Seeing her name in print reminds me of how involved she and others were; how devoted they were and so certain they were that they would be able to change things. How passionate they were… I suspect that  now with the passing of time, over a decade, all that I would need to alter would be the names of the detention centres and the professionals employed to investigate the situations there. Every other detail that she and other professionals gathered in their inquiry would remain the same and still be just as relevant. Is that possible? Can it be? Nauru substituted for Woomera? Are we all fools at the hands of our government who treats us accordingly?

“Every time I started an interview, I would ask for their names. They all responded with their number. For example, ‘I am 1427’. The implications are frightening.”(The Age, July 17 2010)

Now that I have reached the end of the article my head is full of questions: Are asylum seekers still referred to as numbers? Are there still children in detention? Are there still incidents of self-harm and suicide? If one or more of the answers to these questions is yes it will not be good enough. With all the therapists, lawyers, doctors, teachers, activists and dollars we have thrown at this situation, where have we arrived? What have we achieved? If even one of the answers to my questions is yes the answer is nothing. I squeeze at the memory of that time in my flat with those wafting smells of a faraway place. I want to believe that those moments can make a difference; they can lead to change, they can inspire and ignite hope. But the pressure of the next day is already dawning on me and my eyes have caught the title of the 2010 news article – Birds in a cage. Am I imagining it or are we all being put to sleep on purpose? My eyes close and slumber takes over.

If I leave in two minutes I will make the 7.30 am train and arrive almost a full hour early. That will give me some quiet time to figure out a solution to the problem before the masses arrive. I glance over the news. Tony Abbot asks:

“Where was the Human Rights Commission during the life of the former government when hundreds of people were drowning at sea?” (The Sydney Morning Herald, February 12 2015) I laugh to myself but really we should all be bawling our eyes out. And the questions swim around in my head: What did I do, what am I doing, did I do enough, am I doing enough.

And so we go. I am you and you are me. On a train, in a car; in an office or in a cafe. It makes no difference. What will I put in my sandwich today? Or maybe I’ll eat out and avoid the lunchtime conversations altogether.

The names of the people discussed in this piece have been withheld due to privacy.

by jsetc

What does Henry Kissinger have to do with it?

My grandmother went to school with Henry Kissinger. Although they never really shared anything beyond a class photo it is a fact that remains after many others have disappeared to that place where forgotten memories pile up like stock to be counted. Sometimes I wish I could find the pile so that I could discover other cool facts to share. Yet I know that what ends up in the pile desperately wants to be forgotten forever. There are some things we drag along with us though, despite their ugliness, their bitterness and the pain their memories cause. We pull them along in the hope they will keep us grounded in the place just in-between remembering and forgetting, so that we won’t be dragged down by them – or led astray without them. In reality though my life is so far removed from that of my grandmother’s that the fact she and Sir Kissinger shared a photo once upon a time seems ludicrous to me.

My grandmother also once came home with shit smothered in her hair. She was a beautiful lady and as a girl was tall, voluptuous and vivacious. She would light up eyes with her smiles and when she laughed her whole body would dance ever so elegantly. The only problem was she was Jewish in Germany. So when she came home one day covered in brown manure, smelling awful and crying with shame the fact that she was once at school with Henry Kissinger made no difference at all. This story is one of those memories I drag along with me, hoping it will keep me in that place that stops you from going numb from the senseless bullshit we seem to be smeared in ourselves every day that in turn keeps us from smelling what is actually happening around us.

Janine Schloss' Grandmother

If I look around me I can find lots of similar memories to drag around. I don’t need to look too far to find words like apartheid, Nazi, death camps, survivor, genocide and bloodshed in relation to my recent past. Yet every day, as the news of the world I live in uses words that are associated with my personal lexicon of horrific history; as killings and hate fill the screens of our news broadcasts to the point where it almost appears that the world is exaggerating I feel the numbness setting in and taking over. As the words become louder and seem to be drawing closer my stories about Henry Kissinger feel even more far-fetched than ever before.

This week while the world remembers the Holocaust I will remember my grandmother. She didn’t manage to meet Henry Kissinger again, although she did send him a letter once with a copy of her class photo attached. She did escape genocide though and just like him went on to live a relatively comfortable life in a world so far away from the one she was almost exhumed by. Yet as I remember her, I realise she was one of many and for each of her hundreds more didn’t get away in time. I sit here and think of her and no matter how hard I try I cannot envisage the place her home in Germany became as the Nazi regime set in. It is as far away to me and my comfortable life as Syria, Egypt, Sudan, Ukraine, Afghanistan and North Korea are.

This week people will flick through posts about Holocaust commemoration, just as they flick through updates about asylum seekers on our shores and war-torn places that all blend into one big mess they brush aside and put in a place they can refer to when it suits them to feel politically active. What are human rights? Shouldn’t that be a rhetorical question? On the one hand it seems so crazy to think that they need to be contested at all. On the other hand, as I put pieces of bits of war, bloodshed, racism, senseless killings and thoughtless hate-crimes together with the memory of my grandmother and the fate she was saved from the recent past suddenly morphs into the present and human rights sound like something the lucky few stumble upon.

Yet still this week will pass and nothing will have changed. I will carry on as you will. You might keep in your memory an interesting fact about my grandmother and Henry Kissinger but the world will go on and people will get away with murder. Women will be raped. Children will be tortured. Communities will be excluded. Soldiers will lose their lives. Borders will be crossed in the dead of night offering a glimpse of hope and we will carry on sighing together because the life we take for granted has so many of its own issues and problems that we so flippantly forget how lucky we are. And as hard as I try to actually see Henry Kissinger himself; to see the little boy who escaped Nazi Germany and became state secretary standing in front of me –I cannot. Until I am literally knocked over with a real-life pot I will continue to inhale the apathy drug that puts so many of us to sleep comfortably and enables us to live relatively unaccountably.

When I was much younger I dealt with the harsh realities of war that I learnt about in textbooks with the naïve notion that they occurred in some faraway time when people were monsters intermittently and for a lapse in time didn’t care about each other. That couldn’t happen now, I’d tell my much younger self; people couldn’t possibly let that happen now. And now, years later, as I read headlines of ‘never again’ and ‘lest we forget’, my naivety shines with obviousness. How did World War II happen? Did people get away with genocide simply because it wasn’t televised? What about when it was? What about Bosnia and Herzegovina? What about Rwanda? What about Sudan? What about Nigerian school girls getting kidnapped by the hundreds and used as sex slaves? This is just a brief list of the things we know about – what about the things we don’t know? Would it make a difference? Would you let it happen? What could you do to stop it?

Henry Kissinger, my grandmother and a long line of others were simply lucky. Luck is what saves some and drowns others; it is what feeds babies and lets others starve to death. I have seen how genocide is allowed to happen. It happens just as easily as we switch channels and switch off screens. How do we get away with simply saying ‘oh that’s terrible’ and ‘how can we let this happen?’ How do we walk past indifference in our own backyards and not get knocked over the head by its relevance? We wake up with this drive in our core to change the world and then we go to sleep drunk on the comfort of our own immediate surroundings. We say we care just as quickly as we order another latte and get on with life. We use the same signature to sign a petition as we do to sign a credit card receipt. We say we care. We say we understand. We say our grandmothers were refugees as well. We say our families also arrived on boats. Again we say we care while we thank our lucky stars we weren’t born in that faraway place where people are monsters and nobody cares about each other.