There is obviously much to be thankful for in life, but I have to admit there are a few things that we should be quite concerned about too. The ongoing rate of species extinction has accelerated alarmingly recently, while climate change continues largely unabated as parts of the Northern Hemisphere burn with record temperatures. The United States (a somewhat ironic name given its own dysfunctional internal politics) appears to be trying to conjure an excuse for a war with Iran and our useless Prime Minister has signalled his support (no doubt emboldened by the fact that the proven lies about WMD in Iraq have done little to damage John Howard). Meanwhile record wage stagnation after six years of Coalition government has Australia steaming towards a painful recession. If you hadn’t been too worried about much of that recently, I don’t actually don’t blame you… because you probably barely heard about it. Unfortunately it seems there is simply no time for news outlets to report and analyse these types of issues when they have to cover every utterance of one self-entitled rugby player (well former rugby player now) and every rumour about the British Royal Family. Now admittedly, it takes a monumental effort to deservedly unseat Bernard Tomic as Australia’s least likeable sportsman (kudos Israel), but that hardly makes it anywhere near as significant as anything I mentioned earlier so I am not even going to talk about it. I wish everyone else would stop too. As I mentioned in the first paragraph, our world- and our country in particular- are facing some pretty serious problems that we should be talking about; but our media networks and a lot of commentators on social media obviously disagree.
But hey, that is just the media. Surely our political leaders- whose explicit job is to serve the people of this country and protect their futures as best they can- will be focused on these threats and taking decisive action to mitigate them? You’d like to think so, but unfortunately, no they’re not. Based on its own words and actions, this government’s first priorities appear to be new legislation to help redistribute more money to the wealthiest in society (despite pleas by the Reserve Bank to do something to stimulate the economy instead) and to protect religious groups’ rights to discriminate- when they seem to already have a pretty fair scope to do so already. They are actively undermining attempts to protect threatened species or reduce carbon emissions, publicly backing the USA in its rhetorical clashes with Iran and China- while doing nothing to ward off the recession they are creating. According to legend, Nero fiddled as his city burned. What are we doing as our wold does the same?
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