By Desmond Rutherford | Adelaide, Australia -- Police: Occupy Melbourne
We never learn to help each other until we find our own survival threatened, it seems, and only then do we attempt to correct an injustice. This is not altruistic behaviour as much as it is the feeling that we ourselves are affected.
This, I think, is a large part of the motivation behind the Occupy 'wherever' movement; people feel that revealing the injustice of poverty is all that they have left available to them.
Although many Australians are keen observers of events around the world; aware of attempts to protest revolt or tyranny, or both, we are also mindful that the dangers of civil unrest could forge an opportunity for corrupt authorities to exert unjustified control over the populous.
Australians know about Martin Luther King's leadership in the African-American Civil Rights movement. Australia is not 'burdened' with a Bill of Rights. We share pacifist desires for a peaceful planet of loving peoples, as John Lennon did, but the images in the video below are more reminiscent of Gandhi inspired acts of non-violence by the protesters.
The following video clearly shows the unneeded force used by the Melbourne police in repressing a peaceful crowd.
Whatever moral ascendancy the authorities held was lost here today. ~Paraphrased from Richard Attenborough's film, Gandhi.
The following links to reports on the Melbourne incident reveal their own biases.
Paraphrasing Gandhi:
Poverty is the worst form of violence.To gain a just and equitable society, we must prove ourselves worthy of such a society.Where there is injustice, we must always believe in fighting it.Injustice must be made visible.There is no cause for which we should be prepared to kill.Non-cooperation with evil is a duty; dishonesty, greed and avarice are evils.The function of civil resistance is to provoke response.All through history, the way of truth and love has always won.
But I would add, at an often terrifying cost.
Advance Australia Fair!
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