Be specific, but not overly descriptive. Be bold, but not irrational. Be brave, but not insensitive. Be kind, but don’t be disheartened by the selfishness of others. Don’t be glass half full. Don’t be glass half empty. You don’t have enough time to be measuring milk the rest of your life.

Be a pain in the arse sometimes; Putting up with you shows how much your friends love you. You don’t have to say it, but show it once in a while. There aren’t enough hugs going around. Give a few now and then, and don’t think of them as free, because they’re not. That’s what makes them special.

Wake up early. Sleep in late. Stay up all night obsessing. Stay away from your own company; other people are easier to get along with. Try new things, but don’t give up the good stuff. Be yourself, but be willing to change.

Write. Words will free your mind. Work in a boring job; that’ll free your mind too. Do something you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life. Tell stories; other people need to know who you are. Some people are better than others, but who they are depends on who you ask.

Go to a concert. See a movie. Stay at home and be lazy instead. It all matters eventually. Take a chance sometimes – go out instead of staying home. Don’t make plans. Being spontaneous makes you interesting. You are weird. That’s what makes you fun. Keep being weird. If anybody asks, don’t tell them you took my advice.

Believe in what you want and who you want, where you want and when you want. More importantly, believe how you want. Live life. You only get one, unless you think you get more, in which case don’t live your life. You get another one, right? There’s time to live later. Right?

And most importantly, above all other things, no matter what you do or who you become:

Save the platitudes. Because platitudes are people too.

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.

There was an article published by The Australian just this weekend past that tackled this same topic, but was centered mostly around the film ‘The Girlfriend Experience’. I’ve not seen this film, I probably won’t ever see this film, not because of the subject matter but simply because the concept doesn’t interest me.

I’m less interested in discussing Hollywood here. A pornographic film is classified by a governing body and rated accordingly, it shows genuine intercourse and sexual activity. But what about paintings? Or photography? Or one of the many other art mediums that aren’t filtered through a panel of people wearing high waisted pants viewing them through thick coke bottle glasses and giving their stamp of approval, or denial?

Whether it’s a self taken photograph posted online, or a professional photo shoot, there’s definitely a distinction between erotic art and softcore pornography, but this line is determined by the eyes through which they’re viewed. While a dimly lit black and white shot of a naked girl wearing nothing but lashings of leather could be considering an artistic representation of the human form to many people this same image would be considered debase and immoral.

In a post I made about a month ago about moral obligation I discussed how morality applies to the individual and their views. These are shaped mostly by upbringing and then by what is considered acceptable by a persons peer group. A lot of you might consider that perhaps what you would share with others is art, and what you wouldn’t want your friends to see you viewing, or find on your hard drive. I don’t think that’s the case. An appreciation of artistic merits is an entirely personal thing, and while you mind find the beauty in an image, the knowledge that your peer group might not doesn’t make it any less beautiful.

What the average person considers acceptable has clearly changed as time has passed. What would have been considered completely unacceptable and perverse is drastically different if you look at it in 50, 25 or even 5 year increments. The amount of flesh shown in your average deodorant advertisement today would have been secreted in the pages of a magazine carried home in an opaque bag by my parents if they indulged in such things when they were my age.

Compare if you will ‘The Last Sitting’ photo shoot of Marilyn Monroe, which at the time was definitely considered artistic and not pornographic, but they’re risque photos that said a lot about the actress and was an example of her status as a sex symbol. The same photo shoot of Lindsay Lohan, undertaken 46 years later, had not a single eyelash batted at it. It was a series of photos that were published by almost every internet and print media organization who knew who Lindsay was. It’s also fairly tame considering her reputation.

Isn’t every image art to some degree? Every painting, no matter what it depicts? Every photograph, no matter what it is of? If it’s a girl you know in a mini skirt with her legs spread in front of a car, or a famous photographer taking black and white shots of a model with delicate lighting and creative angles?

Art is what you make of it, it’s not about whether it arouses you, or whether your mum would approve. All art should excite you in some way, be it a childish sense of wonder, getting lost in a sea of colour, or a natural feeling of sexual excitement. Take every visual stimulus you can, and appreciate the art in it all, from a leaf blowing in the wind to a bead of sweat rolling down a chest.

Today is the 20 year anniversary of the begining of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest, which is most famously known to a lot of people from the image above. A single man standing defiantly before a column of tanks.

It has become synonymous with defiance in the face of insurmountable odds. More people would know this image than know about the events beyond the lens.

This tank defying man isn’t exactly my point though. Due to the immense amout of media coverage todays lockdown of the square is garnering, it is understandably a hot topic of conversation world wide, including in my general vicinity earlier today.

A friend of mine spoke up after a radio broadcast mentioned the topic. ‘All these people did was protest, and the Chinese government just sent the troops in there to kill them. They don’t even know how many people died because the information was suppressed. They shouldn’t be allowed to do that… Surely we have a moral obligation-’

Stop.

A moral obligation? What does that really mean? What is a moral obligation and how does it affect you and I?

Morality is an idea of right and wrong, a set of rules. It is wrong to murder somebody. It is right to help the needy. Life isn’t so black and white. We can all think of a number with plenty of zeroes after it and say boldly ‘Well of course it’s worth 1 life to save X many people’. I challenge you to think about something smaller, what would it take for you to take one life? To save two? The numbers seem to add up on that. What about to save a family member’s life, would that be worth somebody else’s? That person is somebody’s  family too. My point is that morality is not black and white, and just because we think something is wrong does not give us the right to judge it, and this means in no way that I side with the men in the tanks over the man on the ground. But somebody, a human being, ordered those executions, and that man had his own moral code too.

So we’ve established (loosely) that morality is an individual thing, that is defined by each person’s choice of right and wrong. When are you obliged to act on that? Because your morals differ with those of the person involved strong enough? Murder is immoral, and people are punished for it. Can you punish a man for acting immorally with your wife? Is it right if you beat a man who beat someone for their sexual preference? He was just acting within his code of morals, did he surpass his moral obligation?

Does a moral obligation become a right to judge somebody else’s values? How can you enforce your own morals without becoming the persecutor? Do you even have the right?

Our governments have requested the names of those killed in 1989 be released to the public, and that any people still imprisoned be released. This is a PR stunt, they know their requests will fall on deaf ears, but they cannot be seen to be doing nothing. All they can do is voice their moral objection, but not act.

Our only obligation is to stick by our own morals, our own code of conduct. Lest we think we know better, and punish a country whose morals we disagree with. We’ve seen this before, we’ve all bought the T-shirt. It’s not a pretty T-shirt.