Actually it's not very serene here at all. There's a big thunderstorm that came through today, and for some reason big thunderstorms here seem to come with tornado warnings. I kept out of the rain today though, just had to step over some fallen trees on my way to work.
Last night was the State of the Union speech. Tell you what, I'm so much more into politics here than I was back home. I loved the State of the Union, but in my eyes Obama can do no wrong, other than making the mic give a little thumping noise every time he put his hands on the podium. I also really really want Rick Santorum to drop out of the race soon, because he represents everything evil about America ("I'm going to nationalise my prejudices and call it American family values").
But I did get the overwhelming impression that America is all about protecting their way of life. I'm pretty sure most countries are about that too, but America is the one I'm viewing with a outsider's eye right now (although becoming less and less of an outsider every day). There's just this feeling that there's something sacred about going to college, getting a good job, owning your own home and being a citizen of the most powerful nation in the world. Does anyone else get the sense that there's something wrong with this picture? What is it?
And the other question that is haunting me at the moment is this...whose backs are we riding on in order to live that life? Doing Freedom Train, reading "State by State" (a book Mum gave me about the fifty United States), thinking about Australia Day...these are all making me aware that very good things and very evil things are all mixed in together. On Friday I left Freedom Train rehearsal, where I daily explore the fact of slavery, to go to Fredericksburg. Then the next night in Fredericksburg we got to a little historical-ish restaurant that encouraged you to "go back and visit the 1800s", and they had an old cotton gin out the front....with some cotton fluff in it...and I thought, whose hands operated that machine?
Southern gentility, the cotton industry, the wealth of the South...all these things were really tied up with slavery. It's the same with Australia. We wouldn't be the country we are or the people we are without shitty colonialist attitudes, genocide of the Aborigines, and transportation, which I think we're all agreed was a low-down, unfair thing to do to a person. I mean, Australia's great and all, but if someone wanted to ship me off to the end of the earth coz I committed petty theft, I'd say thanks but no thanks.
And yet, I'm proud of my heritage, and I know I wouldn't be an Australian of British descent if it hadn't been for the colonisation of Australia. Even though I'm pretty sure I had no ancestors in the First Fleet, I buy into the legends and the mythology and the imagery - I am proud of my supposed convict past; drovers and Aussie battlers haunt my dreams; I feel that on some basic level I must be a stockman, even though until a couple of weeks ago I never held a whip in my life; I am a British settler bringing things like cricket and tea and hoop skirts to a harsh environment in order to maintain my way of life. I love my home country, I'm learning to love the country I live in, and I even really love the Motherland (please, God, let me live in London one day). But there's been an awful lot of cruelty and unfairness in the past to make these places the way they are.
And... whose backs are we riding on now in order to maintain them?
In honour of Australia Day, I shall leave you with some song lyrics to enjoy and/or ponder. They come from a musical called Manning Clark's History of Australia. A chorus of convicts sings this song early on in the show, and then in the finale every single character, including Henry Lawson, Dame Nellie Melba, Queen Victoria, and a bunch of other historical characters, reprise it together:
We are they who paved the way,
That you might take your ease today.
Convicts sent to hell
To make in the desert a living well;
To bear the heat, to blaze the track,
Crimson furrows across our back,
To split the rock, to fell the tree:
A nation is because of me.
I agree with all you say! especialy as I sit here, in my house, my dog at my feet and my son and daughter playing together in the other room. I tell Matt that my American Dream (the idea that you can do or become anything) is to sell all I own and move away from America.
ReplyDeleteLove your posts Amy!!!
-Heidi