We are with whom the buck stops

(a post from September 2008)

Grumpybum and I are pariahs in our small town.

We shouldn’t be. Folk here live close enough to Melbourne to commute, have access to commercial media and therefore current information (albeit pre-digested and state controlled) and are close enough to “living off the land” to theoretically be invested in keeping “the land” “liveable”. But they seem to have no concept of the sustainability imperative, and no appreciation that each of our careless acts of wastefulness and needless consumerism impacts on someone, somewhere -- and ultimately, all of us.

Yesterday I entertained five minutes of madness as I thought about running in the local council elections, with the hope of leveraging some sort of passion and awareness within my community. The moment passed with the realisation that I’m simply not influential, funky, charismatic or visible enough to stand a chance for election. So this humble old monotreme will have to go back to her plodding ways of chipping at human conscious “being” and conscience while hopefully keeping her own enviro-snout clean.

Still bloody pissed off that people can justify being such consumers of Kul-ture and products, and ignore everything and everyone beyond their own fence. Like it or not, we’re all interconnected and if each one of us doesn’t honour our neighbours and Earth, we all lose. We are with whom the buck stops.