SOUTH WEST MULTICULTURALISM
HOW DO WE RESPOND TO BALI?
By Dave Roberts
1, 2, 3, 4, we dont want no stinkin'
war.
For a while I've been revelling in
the low key multiculturalism that we see in Bunbury.
I'm sure it's everywhere, but wandering up and down
Victoria Street you can buy bread from Asians, beer
from Irish, kebabs from Middle Eastern guys, get
your hair cut by an Italian, and of course the pizza
comes from a bloke who's as Aussie as me....
There's much more, but the dynamic
I've found here is different from say, Northbridge
in Perth. There's no sense of anyone having to fit
in, and I haven't recognised the sense of fear that
goes with large groups of one ethnicity banding
together to maintain their culture. Day or night
I can wander the street and I want to keep that.
For a while I've wanted to write about
it. We backed away from writing the stories about
the fun and games that have come from me trying
to communicate and the dramas that my poor Arabic
or dreadful Asian dialect produce. It's not quite
as good fun in writing as when you're there.
September 11 changed things all over
the world, and not very long ago it got much closer
to home in Bali. These last few weeks I've been
finding a level of sadness that just surfaces from
time to time. This shouldn't happen, not to Australians
on holiday, and not to the peaceful balinese. Some
ratbag wants to take away the peace, and love, and
fearlessness that has characterised the way we live,
but stuff it, I'm not letting go.
The outpouring of practical help toward
the australian victims of this bombing and the clarity
that the balinese are victims in this and deserve
support has made me hopeful and proud of the way
we respond as a nation. Under the onslaught of continued
attacks on our lifestyle, can we hold it together?
I'm no friend of the regimes in the
middle east who train and arm terrorists, and if
anyone offends against humanity with bombs, guns
and knives, then I'm fine with justice and our governments
have a job to do. I get a bit confused when we see
a war mooted as a response to terror, because I
can't see that bombing Baghdad back into the 1500s
is going to produce any less hatred, and indeed
if someone bombed my kids' school I'd probably get
grumpy. Hatred begets hatred. While individuals
might be committed to hate, and it seems right to
stop them and the organisations they build, I can
only see the civilian population suffering. Lots
of Iraqis died in the last gulf war, and many poor
and young starved in the sanctions that followed,
but it doesn't seem to have hurt Saddam Hussein.
My scripture says that the right response
to hate is love (I bet yours does too). The thing
with the south west is that you really don't have
to go far to find someone who's different from you.
It might be race and religion that makes them different,
or it could be something that they've chosen, I
still don't understand a lot of the body piercing
stuff. So how do we hold onto what is good?
I propose that we act consciously,
making sure that the way we respond to hatred is
with love. This month, the challenge is for all
of us to pray about it, and then get out the door
and CONSCIOUSLY PERPETRATE AN ACT OF KINDNESS AGAINST
SOMEONE WHO IS DIFFERENT FROM US. Funding world
vision to lift some little kid out of a life of
poverty is good, and we all should do that, but
I'm begging each one of us to find someone who is
different enough from us to produce that feeling
of discomfort and even fear, and then just do something
nice. Too scared? Do something nice for their kids.
At South West Life we've been pretty
conscious about being neutral and not wading into
political questions. We want to stay that way, so
this isn't about who we should vote for, but please,
please, before we send our sons and daughters to
face guns, gas, and anthrax in a desert somewhere,
let's work out will it make terror less likely.
Let's insist that the decision makers apply the
same measures to the question as well.
November 2002
