The Forum > Article Comments > A sad reflection > Comments
A sad reflection : Comments
By Stephen Hagan, published 23/3/2006Ignoring an elderly, sick lady lying on one of our city streets is a sad reflection on Australian society.
- Pages:
-
- 1
- 2
- Page 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
-
- All
This is not a race issue, it is an urban issue. It rarely happens in a country town and once, in what some call the 'bad old days', it rarely happened in Brisbane. There is something about the anonymity of metropolitan life that enables the mind to screen out any inconvenient moral obligation or confronting image.
This anonymity allows people to say to themselves, "I can step over this dieing person and no-one will know that I did it". This capacity to compartmentalise events in their day means they can act with extraordinary indifference with no cost to themselves. It is the essence of the urban notion of 'privacy'. A notion that has little meaning, and even less value, in a country town or remote community.
And the breathtaking irony of it all is that the metrononymous can then dismiss conservative country voters as having a lack of 'social conscience', some sort of moral deficit, for failing to vote for policies of welfare largesse.
And lets not be deluded here, Auntie Delmai was outside a university, where the voting patterns would be very similar to the readership of this web forum. That is, more than 25% green, 55% ALP and only about 15% conservative.
And they have the gall to lecture farmers on sustainability and intergenerational equity.