the politics and parenting - incomplete thoughts

We are nearing the end of 3 weeks of school holidays during which the children have undertaken a screen detox.

I specify the children because I did not do the screen detox, although I should have. Instead I got sucked into Twitter and instagram trying to find some sense in the political landscape amid the upcoming election.

What am I trying to make sense of? I'm not entirely sure. 

I have very strong negative feelings about Donald Trump and Elon Musk.  

I know, love, and respect people who voted for him. I also know people who have unfriended people they've known for a long time over facebook posts they've shared seeming to support Trump. 

Locally, I am supporting an independent candidate running against Peter Dutton. Her name is Ellie Smith and I have a corflute sign with her face on it perched at the end of my driveway. I have never met her, but I have friends who consider her a close friend, and from what I know about her she is living by her values of sustainability and I think that is really admirable and exactly the kind of person I want representing me in Canberra.

She has a lot of local support, although so does Peter Dutton. Driving home any day I see Peter Dutton's face on innumerable corflute signs.

I get the feeling Ellie is making an impact - I see folks wearing her signature maroon shirt dotted along the main roads, jumping around waving with signs with her face on them. It strikes me that she has a pretty big presence in Dickson, compared to Ali France, who apparently is on her 3rd run challenging Peter D yet I haven't seen as many corflutes of her face. 

We got some propaganda in our mailbox yesterday, some from ALP and some from Dutton's office. Both had Peter Dutton's face on them, but very different. ALP's had two shots of him, both black and white. In one, he looked like a madman. In the other he was scowling. 

I showed the children how each side chose photos of Dutton to tell their very different stories. I want them to learn how they are always being a sold a story, and learn to identify how it is sold. 

They have strong views about Peter Dutton, which they've picked up from school. For them, he is evil personified. I'm uncomfortable with this, although I myself don't like the guy. When they ask me about him. I try to be more neutral. Although maybe the whole "two wings on the same bird" idea isn't very neutral, if antiestablishment.

I don't manage to pull off neutral when it comes to Trump and Musk. 

Yesterday, we went to the mall for some sushi and stopped into the cheap shop looking for a pantry basket. I was shocked to discover they were selling little statuettes of Trump. At first I thought they were taking the piss, but then I saw they had a stack of MAGA hats too. MAGA hats! At the Dollars and Sense shop! I was not able to hide my disgust and we left.

What is it about Donald Trump that upsets me? 

I remember when Bush beat Al Gore and how I couldn't even stand to hear Dubya speak. For years I couldn't bring myself to listen to his voice. Long after he was no longer president, I heard him speak on some talk show and it challenged my recollection of him sounding like a buffoon. He sounded charming and even intelligent. And my antipathy evaporated. I now feel neutral about Dubya.

And yet, despite having experienced this, I can't listen to Trump speak. 

I just tried. I don't believe a word that comes out of his mouth. We are being ripped off by close to every country everywhere in the world? I can feel myself pulling faces that could probably be turned into emojis.

Sometime in my youth, my mother told me she would disown me if I ever voted republican. I don't think that's why I never have. I tend to rebel against my mother.  Honestly I think if it weren't for guns and racism and human rights, maybe I would vote republican. Theoretically I do think states should have more power. In practice, I don't want states to prevent marginalised populations from accessing education and services I believe are human rights. Some of those states cannot be trusted to look after their population appropriately.

I digress. Why do I dislike Donald Trump? Can I make sound judgements about him having only heard him speak a handful of times? My opinion of him is that he's a power-hungry egomaniacal narcissist, and far more dangerous than Dubya ever was even though Dubya led us into a war on a false premise and so many people died. Trump has given Elon Musk, the world's literal supervillain, a bigger platform than he already had and that is terrifying.

I hope my children make informed decisions when they reach the legal voting age. And I will keep pondering how to lead them through this mess.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Feeding Children

Feeding children is the pits. Some children apparently enjoy food. When my eldest was a baby, I was smug in the knowledge that I was following Ellyn Satter and was doing everything right and therefore I would raise Good Eaters.  A Good Eater eats the food you feed them. They try a new food 60 times until they like it, and you cook what you like and just make sure there’s some bread they like on the table and not worry about what and how much they eat. This worked well for about 4 years. And then my eldest became Picky. Picky is a horror film of parenthood. I don’t think I understood what it truly meant.  It means slaving away at meal planning and spending a small fortune on ingredients and then slaving away on actually cooking and even baking your own bread and then your children saying you’re the worst cook ever and refusing to eat the food and just wanting to eat store-bought disgusting gluten free bread with butter. And you die a little inside every day. I remember having a...
Read more

It is night and I am mother

What a depressing scene is the platform formerly known as Twitter. I went on there to try to become involved in politics again, maybe get a sense for where things are and where they are going and I wished I had that t-shirt of Homer Simpson backing into the bushes. There was a video of Elon Musk talking about immigration. He is cringe. Things here are going. On the weekend we went to see The Minecraft Movie and that was a delight. I love Jack Black. There was a strange phenomenon where prepubescent boys sitting behind us in the audience cheered and shouted whenever certain things happened - a portal opened, the crafting table appeared. I think maybe it is a Tiktok trend. The next day I enjoyed two French films at the final weekend of the French Film Festival, Le Fil and N'avoue Jamais. Le Fil was phenomenal. I was on the edge of my seat, until I just read a scathing review of it and now I feel like it was lacklustre and predictable and a bit exploitative. I am but a humble mum and ...
Read more

it was effing PANDAS

 For several years, we have been struggling at our house. I haven't really let on because I just couldn't explain it. Something wasn't right, but no explanation fit.  My beautiful boy was not thriving. Physically he was not putting on weight or growing, and his mental health was deteriorating. We ended up with an ASD3 diagnosis at the age of 8 despite no early childhood concerns. His psychologist at the time suggested it might help the school have more compassion for the inexplicable and unpredictable behavioural challenges he started to have in his second year of school.  And I had my own reasons for pursuing this, too - NDIS funding, to pay for the sessions I wanted to have with the only clinic I could find that would look at DNA, microbiome, and other things to try to address root causes. I was on a mission for that root cause.  But we worked with these practitioners for literally years, and despite following the indications based on his microbiome and his DNA and...
Read more