I carry with me the fuzzy cognitive dissonance of a white man educated in a settler colony, an old land with new rulers, an Imperial outpost trying to be better, more inclusive and kinder but refusing to go to therapy, refusing to listen, refusing to admit there might indeed be some unreconciled structural hurt surrounding a certain genocide-and-dispossession situation – Australia’s “wHaT rAcIsM?!” brigade only ever a dog-whistle away from the Culture War’s frontlines.
A nation asking itself whether it wants to start listening to its First Nations Peoples on matters that concern them is not at risk of losing its non-existent egalitarian nature, the purity of its constitution, of its democracy – it is simply at risk of understanding itself for the first time, and when you exist in denial nothing is more terrifying.
Source: “The poison in Australia’s bloodstream” – The Shot
Dutton spent years perfecting his hard-man, free-speech warrior character – once noting that criticisms were like ‘water off a duck’s back’. But in an impressive display of his range, he was able to quickly pivot to a thin-skinned, hypersensitive litigant, when he was told someone wrote a five-word mean tweet about him. Utterly convincing.
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