Love Thy Neighbour

“A division into 2 sharply contrasting groups or sets of opinions or beliefs.” That is the definition of the word polarisation. It’s another one of those words that has become politicised of late but at the same time the line that is drawn in the sand is becoming more and more distinct as the days go on.

Our society is now at a pivotal point where we must allow different viewpoints to exist. We should even go as far as to celebrate this very human trait.

Being lucky enough to live in a free and democratic society affords this right of being able to have your own beliefs and to be able to state them publicly.

Good manners are an essential component in a free society. Tolerance, compassion, understanding and a bit of old fashioned love are also part of the recipe for a functioning society.

Intolerance is usually bolstered by a certain level of ignorance plus an unwillingness to learn about the beliefs, customs, history, the wins and losses and the folklore of another group of people. I remember when I was about 8 years old, we lived in East Prahran in a street that was mainly full of people with British roots. But our next door neighbours were Dutch and several houses down the street my Mum had a friend named Mrs Suleman. We called them “New Australians”. I always thought the Turkish name was pronounced “Zulyman”. Her family were from Asia Minor an exotic place between Europe and Asia and every now and again she would send home some aniseed flavoured Turkish bread or some other treat from Istanbul. I never ate her offerings due to the simple fact that I was certain that I would be poisoned and die. On top of this the Turks were our bloody enemies who fought against the Australian soldiers at Gallipoli. Back then I knew nothing of Turkish culture, the Ottoman Empire or for that matter that the Australian soldiers were actually attempting to invade their country.

I also recall when I was around 18 and the war against Vietnam was raging. I attempted to learn about the history of the Vietnamese people and their struggle against colonial powers … The Chinese, The French and in the 1960s The Americans and by default The Australians. I was impressed by their tenacity, I felt compassion for them and realized that they just wanted to be free like I was. This was enough to put me firmly into the camp of the anti-war movement and I was willing to go to jail if I was called up for National Service. Our society was certainly polarised back then but I believe that history has now shone a light on both the futility and the cruelness and inhumanity of this war and every other war that mankind has ever participated in.

In these ”challenging days of uncertainty” that are upon us now we are back in a new situation that has the potential to give us reason to become polarised once again.

The way I see it our biggest weapon against this is our compassion, our sense of humanity and our innate intelligence.

Viruses do not have political allegiances or philosophical agendas, they only have one goal and that is to survive and proliferate and like mankind they are willing to do anything to achieve this goal. Mutate, destroy, trick and create illusions to just keep living.

It has been 100 years since our last world wide pandemic which most people didn’t even know about until recently. The world is now a very different place spiritually, technologically, with enormous corporations and huge enhanced media machines. Public opinion can be directed and modified as has been seen in different recent elections. The algorithms are bloody powerful and have a life of their own.

But underlying all of this we are all individuals who still have the ability to garner our own information from sources that we have chosen based on our own research. It is not asking too much to implore each other to look for ourselves in this age of information. It is easy to parrot the views of others, to trust the experts, to have faith in those who “know more than we do”. But please, look back at history. We trusted President Johnson when he told us that a North Vietnamese gunboat fired on an American ship which justified the next 2 decades of death and destruction in South East Asia. This was later found to be fabricated and untrue. We trusted Ansell Keys when he told us that saturated fat was killing us and followed his new road to low fat, high carb/sugar hell that has ended in a very sick and obese society. We trusted the Warren Commission who convinced us that Lee Harvey Oswald acted on his own to assassinate President Kennedy which then changed the course of modern history. We trusted George Bush and Tony Blair who told us that Iraq harboured weapons of mass destruction, another lie which resulted in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths.

There are many sides to every story. The evolution of life on our planet is just a big experiment that we modify as we move forward through time. Sometimes we get it right and other times we get it wrong. Look at communism. It seemed idealistic when Karl Marx first wrote about it but when it was put into practise it just didn’t work. Look at the huge and deadly world wars, they really served no purpose and when you look closely they were just out of control arguments that could have easily been resolved with simple communication, saving the lives of millions of innocent people. Look at religion. Unfortunately the most profound example of polarisation that has ever existed on our planet.

So our best weapons now are our innate intelligence and our willingness to explore as many possibilities as possible.

Our preparedness to be tolerant of each others beliefs.

We are the human race, not the vaccinated or the unvaccinated.

This division is what caused all the uncalled for deaths during the so called holy crusades 1000 years ago when there were the believers and the infidels.

If you see anybody provoking another person for their beliefs, even if they are contrary to your own, you have an obligation to attempt to put the fire out and not to pour petrol on it.

We are all different to some degree. It may have been preempted by our upbringing, our education, our political affiliations, our own personal sense of ethics, our current peer group or even the people we work with.

Let’s stop labelling each other as the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. Let’s all help each other to improve our health and the efficacy of our own immune systems. Let’s offer love and compassion to each other no matter what our beliefs are.

The medical world and ongoing research about this current pandemic will evolve as time goes by and there will be many different but valid viewpoints that work or don’t work to a greater of lesser degree but the one thing that is certain is that mankind will persist and that one day the future generations will be able to look back on what worked and what didn’t and how we handled the pandemic of 2019/20/21 and beyond.

To finish off I’ll say that it is possible to agree to disagree and that just because you have the numbers behind you that it doesn’t mean that you are irrevocably right. If somebody you know or run into expresses an opposing viewpoint just listen and acknowledge. You don’t have to agree. After all the passage of time may prove that they were correct (or not).