Brody's Scribbles... Boundaries And The Gene Pool

By Desmond Rutherford (Adelaide, South Australia) July 1 |  Like most countries, policing borders is a big problem for Australia with much of its coastline unpopulated.

We have had the infamous 'White Australia Policy' now thankfully no longer officially in force.

We have an immigration policy that at times seems heartless and incompatible with humanitarian objectives for would-be immigrants, 'boat people' who come uninvited and a selective policy for allowing new immigrants. The Australian indigenous peoples had no immigration policy and the white English boat people took advantage of that. 

To look at Australia's size, it is often thought that we have a large uninhabited country that we selfishly try to keep for our small population. What many people do not realise is that the majority of Australia is barren land with no water and little more than salt bush in the 'outback.' It is uninhabited because it is uninhabitable. 

In addition our water supply is severely threatened and is barely able to supply the needs of farmers let alone an increase in population.

Governments are slow if not incapable of ratifying agreements between the states to preserve the major River Murray supply line of water in the states through which it flows. 

Infrastructure in all states is poorly upgraded and maintained let alone any new structures.  The answer being proclaimed by some is to increase the population so we can afford to make things better, expand our cities, create new population centres as well as increase productivity. How we can support them is not well considered. 

These are the practical limitations of accommodating increased immigration, but there is a percentage rule applied to the ratio of new immigrants to the base Australian population so as to keep the unique Australian culture alive and not corrupted to anyone's detriment. Yeah, right! Simultaneously, it is recognised that incoming immigrants will enrich the Australian way of life through diversity without detracting from the nature of our generally peaceful multi-cultural lifestyle.  

At present we see the older generations fearful of losing the status quo, their lifestyle being challenged and changed by the recent additions to our population. This also happened when we first allowed people of Mediterranean descent to settle in Australia as well as the more recent people from Asia and the Middle East. In the last 50 years we have gone from having one or two Asian restaurants to being able to buy the ingredients to stir fry food in our own homes. Something my mother could not have done and would have loved. 

The Internet (unfiltered) has opened doorways for a world culture. Exchange of ethnic traditions and cultural events has enriched our lives immensely. 

But, there is a darker side to these exchanges which are not exchanges but attempts to impose belief systems on the other tribe, the host country, even to the point of extinction for both tribes. 

I'll take a moment to try to show the origins of the darker side, by telling you about one of my cats. She was rescued from an early demise when her owner had to shift location to a place that could not accommodate pets. We adopted her, called her Miss Piggy because she ate a lot, and she soon settled in with our resident alpha male cat who showed her every kindness even though he preferred the company of male cats. (I kid you not; he was a poofy-cat. Takes after me I suppose.)  

Anyway, after a few months a neighbour's very handsome male cat wandered into our back yard and Miss Piggy came running into the house through the kitty-door, with her fur spiked, doubling her normal size, which as you might guess was considerable. She raced up to the glass patio door where the visiting cat was looking into the house and Miss piggy hissed and snarled and jumped around behind the protection of the glass door. The poor neighbour's cat was terrified and took off home as fast its legs would run. 

Now, our afore-mentioned alpha male cat had been sitting watching the proceedings. He stood and calmly walked over to Miss Piggy, raised his paw and slapped her across the head, then he licked her affectionately. He then turned tail and went back to his throne. Miss Piggy looked at me with a bewildered look, so I told her, "You should know better, after all you were once an orphan and we took you in." 

What we can see from this story is that like Miss Piggy, we do try to defend and protect our territory. This would be a very early instinct for our ancestors to safeguard their tree, cave and tribe. Eventually we learned that trading with the next cave alongside ours, was mutually beneficial and social interrelationships strengthened the gene pool if not avoided bloodshed, well, at least some of the time.  The alpha males of both caves set the rules of trade and exchange. (This is not to say that some caves weren't run by alpha females.) 

We needn't concern ourselves for the moment with trade conditions of the cave-dwellers, except perhaps to note that if one cave had the only running water, they were at a distinct advantage in negotiating 'deals' with the cave-dwellers who didn't have water. If negotiations broke down however, then bloodshed may have been the outcome until someone realised that killing off the other tribe wasn't all that bright an idea as it reduced the choice of gene pool contributors; not that they thought of it in those terms, as far as we know anyway. 

Nevertheless, when one tribe has an advantage over another, the deprived often become the slaves of the enriched. The only hope they have is in deliverance from their oppressors. When the belief in salvation becomes the obsession of the enslaved, the enriched lose the capacity to control the slaves except by brutal force, often accompanied by brutish thought.  

If both of these tribes have developed cultural belief systems through the cerebration of the reasons for existence then the results may well be a bloody crusade to dominate the other tribe regardless of which one has the water (or oil). If however the deprived are undernourished they may well be prepared to go down fighting for their survival.

Please note that it does not matter if either or both are depraved in their state of deprivation, except where the depravity is against the right to be able to live.  

Being on the sinful side of the other tribe's beliefs is quite irrelevant to the inherent need to fight oppression; to fight for the freedoms contained in the declaration of human rights. 

But the defining of human rights is an ongoing discussion in itself, even it we are aware of the most basic, the most obvious, the self-evident ones. 

Here-in lays the core problem for integration, assimilation, immigration. How much of a culture is sacrificed, how much do we forgo our own natures, our tribal beliefs, our status quo  to achieve peaceful co-existence? What constitutes the need for sacrifice, or can we have it all?  

Perhaps we need to cerebrate a little more, or less, and make the case for intellectual honesty to override those primitive tribal beliefs with a natural but matured instinct to love, and let love.  

That way we might see that our fears of being intruded upon are nothing more than denying the opportunities of diversity, of enlarging the human experience, and even giving us a bigger gene pool in which to play. 

I for one would love to play with what is in some of those jeans, even if it meant I had to slap them first, and then lick them affectionately. 

One thing seems certain, trying to limit diversity, or the exchange between cultures, or acceptance of our differences, are all in some way, extinction events.