WHAT THE MARTIN PLACE SIEGE RESPONSE REALLY SAYS ABOUT SYDNEY

Well it's the night before Christmas and all through the CBD, not a creature is mourning, and that includes me!

I think it’s fair to say (or at least to hope) that Sydney’s pseudo Floriade has about drawn to a close. Oh sure, the media will continue to milk it for what it’s worth and no doubt Kochie & Sam and the gang will continue to reign as undisputed saviours of a city that would have been lost without their moral guidance and encouragement in our nation’s “loss of innocence”, but for the most part the Big Bang of solidarity has made way for a solemn fizz of righteousness as people return to 'normal' daily life.

As no one can have failed to notice, I was neither a participant nor a supporter of the "Great Outpouring", but I was a very interested observer.

Having given some considerable thought to the events in Martin Place after Monis took the lives of two out of 23.13 million Australians, it suddenly dawned on me what the flowers, the tearful farewells for total strangers and the “unprecedented outpouring of grief” in general actually signified.

Was it about the deaths of two “totally innocent people”? No!

Was it shock that something like this could possibly happen in Australia? It may have been about that a tad, but just a tad.

Was it about Australians coming together to demonstrate with one voice (or enormous compost heap) that “this nation shall not be overcome!” Not a bit of it.

Sydney does not represent Australia, nor are its denizens representative of the world renown "Aussie spirit".

As anyone who listened to the chatter in even the trendiest non-metropolitan, whole-grain, organic, freeman/woman-picked, small-holding, fair day's pay for a fair day's work coffee nook outside Sydvegas will tell you, the reaction of rural folk was much rolling of eyes, shaking of heads and asking "whatthe???"

And it was this response that gave me my first hint of what all the flowers and wailing actually signified.

It signified that we in Australia, and dare I say particularly those in our state capitals, enjoy an incredibly prosperous, safe, protected; even sanitised way of life.

So much so that we actually enjoy the very great privilege of having enough time on our hands and so few true crises day to day to occupy it, that we can indulge ourselves with over-the-top responses when two complete strangers die far from our gaze.

We know nothing of waking in the morning after a fitful night’s sleep, relieved that our home is still standing. 

We don’t send our kids to school in the morning knowing they will walk past corpses that lay rotting in the streets awaiting burial because folks are too busy carting water or firewood for miles through sniper fire to bury them.

We never have to fear being told a 10 year old son or daughter died after stepping on a mine left over from some half forgotten war, that lay in the rice field they'd been working in since 6am. 

We know little or nothing of watching a loved-one die for want of a few dollars worth of antibiotics. 

Hell, we even pack our elderly off to die in institutions rather than have to deal with all the mess, inconvenience, frustration and social isolation that goes with looking after a parent who has become as dependent as we once were when they brought us into the world and spent the ensuing years wiping our bums, our noses and cleaning up our projectile vomit.

If a couple has 2.4 children in Australia they expect 2.4 to survive to draw the old age pension, yet in much of the world the exchange rate is more like 7 for 2.

In fact in mush of the world there is no pension!

Even the animals we eat die out of sight to be wondrously transformed into specialist French and European cuts on Styrofoam trays, and the animals we keep as companions magically “go to sleep” when they’re too old and too ill to have "quality of life". Or when we tire of them we can give them to ‘shelters’ where of course all the animals find wonderful new homes with harbour views where they eat off silver plates.

What the Martin Place Floriade signified more than anything else is our enormous privilege!

It was a symbol of our profound softness and naivety...an emerging hothouse flower culture that enjoys the freedom of self-indulgence that’s the product of an increasingly controlled rarefied environment.

And perhaps the saddest part of this sorry tale of woe lies in the fact that having made their tributes to the dead they never knew but for Kochie and Sam and sundry other opportunists telling them they should mourn, these same people will have little time for the Salvos, the Smith Family, Oxfam or UNICEF when next they come a-callin'.

After all, they've already given generously to the cause of infotainment journalism, and of course to impoverished florists all across the Sydney CBD.

God bless them, every one!

Anyway, I'll get outaya way now....


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