avatar_fragger

Being driven round the S bend

Started by fragger, November 08, 2015, 11:27:04 PM

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nexor

Photo's I've seen of OZ confirms what I thought life would be like in your neck of the woods fragger.
That kind of behaviour from people might only be found in far off out in the country one horse towns where everyone knows everyone.
We live about 600km from the nearest coastal town/city, about ten years ago sold a holiday flat we had in a small resort town called Umdloti along our northern coast, with a population of about 2,500 - 3,000, and even the permanent residents will tell you it's not safe walking alone on the beach unless you have a Rotweiler with you.
Wherever you go one can see most people have the same attitude where only three people matters to them....... I, ME, and Myself, the devil will take care of the rest, yes you get the exceptions but they are mainly found amongst their own community. 
We tried minority rule, it worked in a way but could not continue forever, now we trying majority rule, and thus far it's a total disaster either the ones in power just take what they want or make up rules to enrich and empower themselves more.

Binnatics

Even participating in a tight social network with good manners serves you personally. You do it because it is your best known way of getting what you want. I think humans are selfish to the bone.  GROARNF! >:D
"Responsibility is not a matter of giving or taking, responsibility is something you share" -Binnatics

Art Blade

[titlebar]Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.[/titlebar]What doesn't kill us, makes us weirder.

fragger

Sorry guys, but I'm just not quite that cynical. Not anymore, anyway. I don't employ good manners as a using technique, or to get something I want. I don't have it in me to be like that. I use good manners to try to make the world a nicer place to live in. Maybe that's a naive attitude, but I don't care. If it has a positive effect, fine. If it doesn't, I haven't lost anything by trying. All I know is that when I've done someone a good turn or helped them out, and they've given me a heartfelt thanks in reply, I feel that much better about myself. So unless by saying "getting what you want" you mean my wish that the world would be a better place to live in, I don't go along with that sentiment. There are people that fit your descriptions, for sure, but I'm not one of them and I know others who are not. And that gives me some hope.

If I'm out walking the dog and a stranger passing me smiles and says hello, what could they possibly be wanting to get out of me? What would strangers walking on the beach be trying to con me out of by offering me a greeting? A little bit of friendliness, maybe?

Yes, everybody is selfish to one extent or another, I think it's tied in to the survival urge. If I was still living in Sydney I might be in complete agreement about everybody being rotten, but after living in the country for seven years I now only agree partially. I've seen first-hand that there are people who still have some decency in them. Maybe I just got lucky and happened to find a rare place with a healthy community spirit, but I have travelled around some of this big country and I've struck the same thing in other towns that I have stayed in while passing through. In those cases it was almost always customer service people or hotel staff that I've dealt with, people who are paid to be friendly, and I'd heard about "country hospitality", but being a city-dweller I dissed those sort of notions as cutesy rural myths. There quite probably are dusty outback dumps where you might get the snot beat out of you for looking at someone the wrong way. If there are such places, they'd most likely be found in the Northern Territory or in the far north-west of the country. I've never been to that region of the country, but I do know that it's still pretty rough and spartan to a large extent in those areas.

I get the impression that a person's attitude to others is largely shaped by where they live. I've become a lot less cynical about people since I've been living where I am now. I've also become more relaxed and easy-going, I used to have a much shorter fuse. There's a sense of being valued here. It's not a huge town but it's not tiny either (approx. 4,700, up from about 3,500 when I arrived) so although some people know others, it's not a case of everybody knowing everybody else, the place is just a bit too big for that. People get self-obsessed in city environments because everybody else is the same way. It's like a virus. Trying to be nice little antibody gets you nowhere, so you might as well just be another viral cell and join in with the infecting of the host.

Apparently people are leaving Sydney in droves (but far more people are arriving there from elsewhere than are leaving, so it's not exactly shrinking). I'm willing to bet that the majority of those leaving are those that have spent most or all of their lives there, like me. I use to love the place, about twenty to thirty years ago, then over the years the relationship gradually soured until I actually came to hate it. It used to be a friendly and vibrant city to live in. But now it's become just another crowded, traffic-choked,  heartless metropolis, and to rub it in you have to pay through the nose to live in it.

Another factor that drove me out was race. I genuinely am not a racist person at heart, but I would be lying if I were to say that racial considerations played no part in my decision to move. I can pinpoint the exact moment when I started to get the poops: it was during a half-hour train ride from the CBD to the 'burbs. It was one of those times where the carriage just happened to be full of talkative people, yet I could not hear one word of English being spoken. It was a cacophony of mostly Asian and Middle Eastern dialects, and it really began to get on my nerves. I don't mean it made me cranky (although it did) - it was more a case of my eardrums feeling like they were being bludgeoned. Looking around, I realised that I was the only Caucasian in the carriage. The racket of loud, jabbering foreign voices bugged me so much that I had to change carriages.

I'm fine with multiculturalism and ethnic diversity, but I do believe it can get out of hand, and it has in Sydney. Whole suburbs have been taken over by non-English speaking nationalities, and depending on where you go, you could be mistaken for thinking you were in Beirut or Ho Chi Minh City. Even all the shop signs in those suburbs are in other languages. I don't mean English and say, Vietnamese, together - I mean Vietnamese only. I find it depressing and so help me, un-Australian, and it makes me feel like a stranger in my own land. Besides, I don't see how we're supposed to achieve anything constructive if half the population can't understand the other half, which is the way things are rapidly going. Where I live now, there are no Middle Easterners and exceedingly few Asians, and they are Chinese, who seem to be naturally keen assimilators. What's happening in some parts of Sydney is not multiculturalism, it's isolationism - "no outsiders allowed" enclave-forming. I'm a third-generation Aussie, living in Australia, and I can be considered by part of the population to be an "outsider"? And if I complain about it, I can be branded a racist. I mean, how racist do you want to get? Moving to someone else's country and then refusing to speak the local language and shutting out anybody who isn't of your own ethnicity constitutes pretty damned racist behaviour in my book. If they're gonna be racist towards me, in my own country, then I'll bloody well be just as racist back at them. Fair's fair.

Oops, I rambled a bit there, but it's a Saturday and it's too hot to go outside :-()

Art Blade

[titlebar]Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.[/titlebar]What doesn't kill us, makes us weirder.

Binnatics

Speaking their own language and hang out with their own types is probably giving them the easiest living in Sydney. I think I would do the same if I was emigrated to, let's say, Germany together with a lot of other Dutch. It's so much more relaxing to talk Dutch to the Dutchies instead of forcing my tongue into horrible movements trying to communicate with the natives. Natives who only live in other neighbourhoods and do different types of jobs, who I only see when I accidentally meet one in the metro.

There's a huge amount of people wanting to get inside Fort Europe. They think they get a better life there. Others who have knowledge of transport onto Europe, exploit the 'refugees' and make them pay large sums of money to get aboard their rusty vessels. We call those people people smuggles and see them as the worst criminals. The 'refugees'probably are thankful to them. They operate in the border zones where no authority wants to burn his hands on the filthiest movements of the human race.

I may be cynical, but I'm damn sure we're nothing better than what nature gave to any living creature. We are just more complicated. Yet still going for what's best for our own :-\\
"Responsibility is not a matter of giving or taking, responsibility is something you share" -Binnatics

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