Outside, the wind is howling. It is mid-December: the days are blood-hot and steamy, even when the skies are overcast like today was. The sun sets now into ominous grey-purple clouds as trees whip in obeisance to the elements.
Today, our hearts are breaking. Children of the seventies, Australia’s Age of Aquarius, we were brought up on dreams of equality, wisps of tranformation, peace marches and flower power, the heady promises of feminism. Teenagers of the eighties, we drank in multiculturalism, witnessed the birth of SBS and the multiple tongues of its declarations of love, went swimming off Sydney’s beaches and revelled in the glory of all of its residents basking in its heat. The nineties started with Keating’s promises of reconciliation and a new hope in Asia… and somewhere in the middle of that decade, it began to fall apart.
Yesterday, it cracked entirely. Tonight, retaliation; revenge; despair.
Now the sky opens. Rain falls. The spectre of racism stalks through my land.
I want to answer it. I want us to rise up in love and hope and defeat it. I want tens of thousands of us in the streets with roses, arms linked, singing songs of peace and declaring that we do not believe this world is the only one that’s possible.
The last time I actually organised a march of any kind as opposed to just attending one was 1988. But it can be done again.
Who’s in? We’ll need people to do media and people to call cops and organise permits and people to organise a PA and microphones and a bunch of other things I probably haven’t thought of. Who’s in, dammit? People fought for these dreams in the seventies and eighties without knowing whether they could achieve anything. We *know* we can. We just forgot to be vigilant and so we lost what we had.