Congruity (Home)

(note: I’ve also emailed him a copy. If you feel similarly as I do, please write to him, his email is: chris.bowen@immi.gov.au)

Dear Chris Bowen,

I voted in my first election in 2007, and I did so for the ALP. I figured that after the conservatism and the xenophobia of the Howard government, a Labor alternative would be a breath of fresh air. It would bring progression and compassion back into Australian politics.

I am disappointed. If anything, your policies on asylum seekers are worse than that of the Howard government, a feat I would have thought impossible. I will not be voting for your party again any time soon. But what is at stake here is more than votes. You and your ALP colleagues will soon be directly responsible for killing Ismail, an asylum seeker from Afghanistan. You insist on sending him back to Afghanistan, alleging that he is in no danger there. This is despite that his father was killed by the Taliban and that his family have sought asylum to Pakistan. He has said that ‘I told Immigration it’s OK if they send me, you can send my dead body to my country because either way I’m dead.’

Now, think with empathy for a moment. How would you feel if you were detained for two years despite not having any criminal charges, let alone convictions. How would you feel if in detention you witnessed three suicides and a riot? And how would you feel if a government literally sent you to death? If those two years in detention were in vain, if the final moments of your life had nothing - no knowledge, no freedom. And for what? So listeners of talk-back radio can feel happy? For the saved $400 a fortnight in Centrelink payments? So that a crumbling government can win a few votes? For what? That’s what I want to know, and what Ismail deserves to know, and what you should be responsible for telling him.

The complete and utter disregard for human life exemplified by the ALP’s policies deeply sickens me. And indeed, so does the way in which asylum seekers - especially those arriving by boat - have been bandied about in discourse to score political points, to create an unnecessary atmosphere of fear, and to create demons in people smugglers where in fact terrorists and oppressive governments are the true villains. This issue is precisely why Australia is a frustrating place to live in for those who have some semblance of empathy (not to mention common-sense).

You are lucky that the media, in its duopolistic and deeply conservative way, is unlikely to make a huge fuss over this. This is your gain. But it is at a huge cost to the world.

The big-picture questions of ultimate goals and wondering about what this is all about is something I most unfortunately muse over excessively. But despite being frustrating it is important, in my opinion, to have some idea of where it is we dream to go.

Firstly, obviously my goal in talking about issues regarding privilege, class, feminism, etc. is to highlight the particularities and injustices of our culture. Here, the things people have been taught and the way things work in order to hide unfairness is firstly not universal (i.e. there is no need for things to always be this way) and secondly a product of inculcation.

Yet, at the same time, in highlighting injustices, Im appealing to something which has a cultural meaning. I am using English, I am making sense in some way. So, clealry even if Im not societys biggest fan, Im working with it. I also dont want it to end, necessarily, just to change.

The kind of things Im working on are based on the assumption that awareness of injustice will also change the level of injustice, it will lead to more justice. But this isnt necessarily the case, there are people who dont care about fairness or equality. This seems to limit the scope of what talking about issues can actually do. However, I do notice that usually an appeal to fairness is culturally meaningful. If people become aware of it, they generally dont like it, its just that unfairness is so well hidden most of the time that most people dont realise what is going on.

I think it seems obvious that activism isnt intended to be some move toward post-culturalism, because there is no evidence to suppose that culture inherrently creates injustice. And indeed, what we would consider to be injustice is contested yet nonetheless embedded in the idea that individuals should be rewarded for working hard (rather than being born into a particular family or getting by purely through similar kinds of luck). In that case, activism assumes culture and there isnt wrong with that.

But, in turn, that would mean that activism is about changing culture and society in particular ways. Therefore, it leads to utopia-creation (or at least a move towards some kind of utopia). For me, relaying an alternative also limits activism because firstly, so few people are willing to articulate a utopia because, and secondly, in doing so you have to acknoweldge that from a seemingly utopian world, other problems, not yet imagined by the activist or by people generally, may arise which may render the utopia even worse than what we all started with. Think Animal Farm.

We also lose perspective in that as much as we might be worried about practical problems surrounded with people trying to live in their everyday lives without pain and undue suffering, such problems tend to become clouded and relayed to others in the talk of ideology. Someone not being able to feed their family, working two jobs, is a victim of capitalism, etc. But as soon as you start abstracting, we lose the raw experience of what it is like to work day-in and day-out and still not be able to achieve basic survival for those relying on you. The experience in itself is reason for activism, it is not really about capitalism or ideology, it is about living. I feel that activism should best turn to empathy, trying to record and understand the daily livesw of other people. Losing the language of ideology is not an option, but getting in those voices needs to be crucial if what is going to underlie activism is to be more important that an imperfectly realised utopian vision.

This is a topic I actually really love talking about and also (ironically) a topic I get very angry about. I’m doing my honours thesis at the moment in medical anthropology (particularly looking at type two diabetes). I’m finding that often the burden of managing chronic illness (especially a chronic illness like diabetes) is put onto the individual and people have an unfortunate tendency to judge those with diabetes based on how well they have been managing themselves.

But the data shows quite clearly that there are all sorts of factors which get in the way of self-management (or even questions if self-management is such a great thing anyway). To some degree, social structures can make us sick. When people become sick and/or stay sick, it’s not always a product of their own personal choices.

Obviously overall in the world, there are all sorts of barriers to health and avoiding sickness. A lack of clean water and medicine, a lack of food or a lack of fresh foods, a lack of shelter, being in a place where natural disasters are commonplace. Also, stress, according to the WHO, is known to be bad for health. And when I say stress, I don’t mean ‘oh god, I have 50 papers due this week’, it’s more the stress associated with ‘I don’t know where my family will sleep tonight’ or ‘I don’t think I will be able to eat today’ kind of stress which is primarily associated with poverty. Indeed, poverty makes people sick (I’m sure this is of little surprise to anyone).

This is to the point where seeing pictures such as these is unsurprising (though of course sad):

However though, it is also the case that health inequalities are produced on a more local level. An African American male living in the US has a lower life expectancy at birth than a man from Bangladesh. Indigenous Australians have a life expectancy of less than 60 for males and under 65 for females. This means that the gap betwen Indigenous Australians and white Australians is somewhere around 17 years. 17! You can do a lot in 17 years, it is a long time. In addition, life expectancy also changes in relation to class (the working class tend to die earlier and particularly tend to live with chronic illness for longer amounts of time then richer people) and obviously gender.

Now, I still honestly get quite shocked when at this stage, people say to me that obviously Indigenous people and the working class and men are lazier than white rich women, they don’t care for their health as much. The working class are working class in the first place because they are lazy, if only they worked harder they’d be middle class. These groups want to be sick for benefits and welfare and all sorts of vile comments like that.

But here is the truth:

• When working class people give birth, the baby tends to be a lower birth weight (something about the working class womb?) which in turn tends to lead to poorer health overall.
• It is quite often the case that people will see cost of healthcare as a barrier to seeking health care, this is even true for countries like Australia and Canada, which have universal health care to some extent. Obviously not going to the docotr when you feel sick can pose/worsen health issues.
• The more rural you get, the more expensive and the rarer ‘healthy’ foods are. There is very little fresh food in remote Australia, as an example. Some people literally cannot make a healthy choice (it’s not that they prefer potato chips).
• This is something I’m planning to write about tomorrow, but it’s not that people are overly uneducated about health and what is good or bad for it. But people don’t always make choices based on their knoweldge, either because they can’t or because they are being compelled by other reasons to not choose ‘healthy’ options.
• Gender roles play an enormous role in terms of life expectancy (not so much because of biological differences between the sexes). Men ‘die to be men’ and are encouraged to partake in risky activities and eat ‘manly things’ like hamburgers and beer. At the same time, women are valued for their reproductive abilities. Indeed, they are highly medicalised throughout their reproductive life, firstly through taking the pill and constantly needing to get refills for the pill (alongside mammograms and pap smears and such). They are then further medicalised if they choose to have children as pregnancy is constantly mediated by doctors. Then, once they hit menopause, that can also be a highly medicalised time as well with all sorts of hormonal interventions deemed to be normal. Being so constantly around doctors tends to make people both constantly under scrutiny as well as fairly healthy.
• Clearly gym memberships and sports and such cost money as well as time. If you have money and time for leisure, you may want to partake in such activities. Obviously that kind of choice is not equally available to everyone.

To some extent, you can say that aside from genetic disorders that can pretty much hit anyone, health is something one inherits, as with money and assets. It is not the domain of the highly motivated and of people who choose to do ‘the right thing’, it’s the domain of people who can.