Don’t get me wrong, I love brandishing an over-sized flag with the best of them and have been known to break out into slurred nationalistic anthems after only a handful of beers. Perhaps I’m sipping on the wrong brand of turps but I’m beginning to think that all this wonderful patriotic fervour is becoming woefully misdirected.
Take
social commentators, Peter Fitzsimons and Mike Carlton for example, both of
whom I admire for their journalistic idiosyncrasies and flair. Ne’er a day goes
by without them bleating about the inappropriateness of our flag or the
shameful ignominy of ‘Straya not becoming a republic. I don’t see them getting
too hot and bothered about real, concrete threats to our country. Does the fact
that the Great Barrier Reef may not have a long term future, appear on their radar? Are they having sleepless nights over the
fate of the beautiful Tarkine, currently being earmarked for open cut mining? Is the continued decline in Koala numbers
sparking any vitriol?
Surely, if you love Australia so much...not as a jingoistic, mental construct but as a place of deep spiritual and physical connection, then surely, by comparison, the pattern on a flag would fade into pallid insignificance as a trigger for outrage.
To
me, the real patriots are people like Miranda Gibson, who sat high up in a tall
tree for over a year in Tasmania’s spectacular Florentine forests to save the
area from logging http://observertree.org/ or Jonathan Moylan, who is being hauled
through the courts for trying to save Leard State Forest from being obliterated
by Whitehaven
Coal. http://maulescreek.org/
There are less Northern Hairy Nosed wombats on
the planet than Pandas, can’t our wonderful sense of patriotic pride be
galvanised to give them some rabid "one eyed" support?
The
land we love is being poisoned, polluted, clear-felled, open cut mined and
dredged. To use a sporting metaphor...we are being flogged all over the park.
And, with apologies to Australian cricket captain, Michael Clarke... when it
comes to patriotism, we are being sold a “pup”.
In
1775, Samuel Johnson famously said “patriotism is the last refuge of the
scoundrel. I reckon it’s time to re-brand this misused human condition for
something ever so slightly more constructive.
William
Lines has written a book on this very subject...called, very appropriately "Patriots"
