Let me get straight to the point with you. The human race is fucked.
Currently in the media is a heart warming story, a beautiful tale, of some council workers paying it forward, doing the right thing. Peter Anderson and Mick Van Beek had some left over pot hole mix from a job that had already been completed, and stopped in at a sportsmans club for lunch. They were on their way to dispose of this pot hole mix at the tip, this was waste mix, it was destined to become nothing more than additional landfill for people to complain about.
Being good old fashioned Aussie blokes, when the proprietor of the sportsman club explained the dangers posed to elderly patrons in an area of pavement at the club, they heard him out. Like most of us would, they cared and listened. And the club owner was able to convince them to use their leftover mix, to fill in this problematic piece of pavement.
They did the right thing, asking for no payment, and doing a favour out of the kindness of their hearts. After all, the mix was going to end up in the tip anyway. No wonder then, that on a later visit to the same club for lunch the grateful proprietor and staff treated them to some free steak sandwiches. Damn, it’s nice to live in a world where genuine people do nice things for each other. It’s lovely. It warms the cockles of the heart.
Pete and Mick were sacked.
Apparently accepting steak sandwiches for waste product is fraud.
Yeah sure, I understand that there are rules and regulations in place, that these checks and balances are there to stop the unscrupulous from illegally exchanging goods and services for goods and services, in an unethical manner. But there is a line. And the Geelong council crossed it blind and stupid. We need rules to keep our lives structured and our community working together fairly, but these rules should come second to being a bloody human being. The rules should serve the people, not the other way around. Sure, if I murdered your cheating wife for you, that’s not fair, but a bit of common sense never went astray. If I had to throw out some government fertilizer and let it go to waste, I don’t see how it wouldn’t be fair for an elderly neighbour to get a nice garden out of it.
This insane adherence to rules and regulations is part of an enormous problem with our society, the council are paranoid that someone up the line is going to over react to this situation and they’ll get in trouble, so they’re over reacting first. The government thinks it’s protecting us from unsavoury things by introducing and internet filter, but the people charged with maintaining lists of blocked content will err on the side of block, over allow, to prevent themselves from getting sacked from the next person in line if 1 person out of our tens of millions finds it, and finds it offensive.
Government is obsessed with this idea that if they create enough rules, with enough caveats, about enough things, that they can finally build a perfect society, where only the right things are done, and everything hums along perfectly. Every problem in the world can be solved this way. It’s on a grand scale, and spread over international governments, but it happens in every aspect of life. They do the same thing with Formula 1 race cars, or V8 Supercars, they keep changing the rules and regulations trying to perfect a system, and every small change they make creates a situation where they need to write another 50 rules.
You can’t program people. You can’t regulate the soul. Tearing alcohol advertising out of sporting events isn’t going to take away the desire to have a beer and relax, the same way that a violent video game doesn’t make you go out and beat people to death. Every human being has a right to make choices about the things they do and the way they act. Don’t penalize ME because a gaggle of drunk bogans burn a car after drinking at the football, I want my sports teams to have the best and brightest athletes, and the best training grounds, and the fastest cars, and the best cricket bats.
Judge the people, and what they do, on the individual merits of the situation. I would love to take Pete and Mick to a footy game, drink some beer with them, and buy them some steak sandwiches.
They could use it. They were sacked.
That’s the biggest problem with this ridiculous proposed web filter – they just have to get one person saying they find, for example, a voluntary euthanasia site offensive, and onto the black list it goes, and no one’s even allowed to know that it’s been banned. Australians don’t want to be censored.
Human society will never be perfect, but you can’t keep punishing the many for the crimes of the few – as Shakespeare would say, that way madness lies.
Furthermore, history has shown that the more you attempt to control a society, the more chaotic it will become, often with culture-crushing consequences. Censoring abstract ideas or (and in particular) creating victimless crimes inevitably puts us on a path to despotism, totalitarianism, fascism, or in the case that things get particularly extreme, societal revolution.
Our country needs to stop trying to make peoples’ lives better by banning everything individuals find offensive, you just end up with an unweildy, beurocratic beast. As the adage goes, a camel is a horse designed by committee. Allow people the freedom to choose, and you will find the absolute majority are mature enough to justify giving them that power.