EVEN UP

DEAR XR

I'm nearly 38 and I'm too old for this. I need to focus on myself. I can't listen to the same obvious solutions that are never implemented. It's been 20 years and I'm done. I won't be one of those tottering seniors who unfatiguably attend meetings with younger folk, I want a home and a homelife. I was always the only one without a car, and always the most left out. I lived in poorer suburbs where activism doesn't happen, ironically. When activism is the activity of the exclusively affluent, it is more pantomime than representative. XR is trying to shock with art, when what is shocking is the distance in worldview between the activist who stops a train and the citizen who intervenes. Keep fighting the general apathy if you like, but the environment I grew up in is already not the same anymore. Queensland is drought afflicted and yet votes go to mining interests while farmers and the reef suffers: I feel there is something cognitively wrong with that. Tassie's protected forests have been threatened for too long, the repitition in the media is more than a mind can bear. Every forest under threat, every sacred site threatened, every river at risk: it is too much! I have been involved with the Greens in two states and both times party focus was on equality for women, I posit at the expense of economic equality. With no car I supported the Greens at two elections in a hostile Central Queensland seat. Without the ability to contribute financially to the party my efforts were impeded, and I was not alone in this situation. Now a generation has grown up under below poverty NewStart payments, what is their worldview? What value does the intangible quality of wilderness hold for the unemployed? Accessing forests is already an activity of the financially empowered. The difference between a person with no car and one with a 4WD is as sharp as the difference between a 4WD and a private helicopter. These economic disparities between ingroup activists and outgroup observers should be ameliorated for the success of the eco-socialist mobilisation. Life under lockdown is basically how much freedom one has with no car. Hence the barrier to involvement.