Dear Australia,
I am sorry, I am not donning the red white and blue today.
This in no way or form makes me an ingrate to the privilege I have enjoyed growing up in this country.
This makes me a human, in full working capacity, able to acknowledge truths when they stand above him, when they stare him in the face in the back alley of his soul.
I can’t take those truths on no matter how hard I try and it is not because of lack of ability to intellectualise, theorise, philosophise or fantasise, whatever one of those ‘ise’ I implore, they are misdirection, misspelling of one word, LIES.
I am big, I am strong and I am secure in my convictions. I am faithful, I am honest and I am kind to my fellow man. I have a heart and I have a soul and I certainly have a mind and they all direct me to put my fists down, to submit my mind, to squeeze my heart and to hold my breath as I dive into oceans of truths that lay secrets buried under beds of atrocities anchored to the history of what makes this country.
I am ashamed. I am not of white descendants. I am not of European colonialist background, my ancestors had nothing to do with the genocide of the original custodians of this land, but I am still ashamed and the burden of guilt grows more and more as I age.
My own people have faced persecution too. For over one hundred years, white supremacy aims to drill into the heart, to burn the fabric of our cultures too. We’ve experienced genocide in the thousands of millions, uncountable numbers for no reason than also being custodians of land that contains valuable resources, that is conveniently in the way of their money pursuits, politics being the scapegoats for the reality of pure greed, brown skin the marketing medium to justify their propaganda push to kill people, human beings, people with cultures and heritages thousands and thousands of years old.
So my Aboriginal brethren, I feel your anguish, never in the manner that can be materialised into the raw emotion that I witness on your beautiful faces, but I feel something. I can’t raise a thumbs up on this day, I can’t raise my eyes from the floor, I share your mourn. I share your sadness. I taste the bitterness that lingers without a sweetness to numb it ever. The taste becoming the familiar flavour forcing an inability to palate anything else.
Please accept my apology for not doing enough, not feeling enough, not knowing enough and being oblivious to anything but myself for all these years.
To God we belong and to God we return, collectively in front of Him will we be stripped naked of our hypocritical clothes, of our oppressor skin, of our privileged flesh and our sullied bones.
There with nothing but our souls, will the court room doors be flung open and in front Him will there be one witness to put us away, to close the trial on us. Our souls will testify against us and we will all pay for that guilt. The laws of nature are the laws of God, there can be no semantic outbursts of fanciness around this. The nomenclature of the soul will bare witness, it’s time humanity became familiar with that nomenclature, to perhaps spare itself the trial that awaits it, the perpetual torment that will haunt us when the trumpet is blown.
Forgive me
Wes
p.s.
This article is one of the best I have read. Do yourself a favour. Put down the beers, the flags and the barbecue tongs. Read something and learn.
lonerloaner 