RUOK

In recent years we've been seeing this cropping up - RUOK Day. When we are all supposed to check on each other's wellbeing. Is it purely a mindless trend, like the Karen Cut and the Full Sleeve? I thought so.

A while ago, though, when I was writing Barefoot Tango, I realised I was deficient in the area of suicide attempts and getting one's stomach pumped, etc. It was necessary to the story, and I never, never skip my research. As a very wise person, I wish I could remember who, once said, 'Time spent in reconnaissance is never wasted.'

It's a delicate subject, and so I reached out on Facebook, trusting that among my many friends and followers there would be someone who could help me. I posted asking that if a person had been involuntarily admitted to a psychiatric facility, or had had his stomach pumped, and if he felt comfortable doing so, he contact me privately, in strict confidence, to share his experience. I wasn't very sanguine about this; I wasn't aware that anyone I knew met these criteria, and didn't really hope for a response.

When I checked in the next day, though, I was overwhelmed. The response was staggering! The sheer number of my friends who had lived through a suicide attempt astounded me. Others had had psychiatric illnesses and been hospitalised. The other thing that overwhelmed me was the utter generosity of these people in sharing their experience. A great deal of the conversations took place in the comments on my post, a lot of people didn't even take advantage of my offer of privacy. I was humbled at the sheer generosity of my friends in willingly reliving those dreadful times to help my work. It was almost as if people had been relieved at the opportunity finally to talk about it to someone. 

The thing that stays with me, though, apart from gratitude of course, is my horror at the sheer number of my friends, people I thought I knew well, who had been through this stuff in their pasts. There is still such a stigma around mental illness, such an incentive to hide it. Or injury; many psychiatric problems, I think could be classified as injury, when they stem from a traumatic event. PTSD springs to mind, and many instances of depression or anxiety disorders. They are common. They are everywhere, and largely invisible. Someone you know is probably struggling right now. And psychiatric illness is just as debilitating, just as detrimental to quality of life, and just as potentially fatal, as a bodily illness.

So let's all remember this. Don't wait for some social-media-inspired Day. RUOK is a principle to live by, every day. It's a habit we all should have, to look for signs that a friend may be in trouble, and to make the opportunity for a conversation. You just could save a life.

 There's an interesting debate going on just now about the definition of antisemitism. You can read The Conversation's piece HERE. And, being me, of course I have an opinion about this. 

Actually, I don't. Both definitions seem fine to me. We ALL know what antisemitism is. We know it in our bones; you can hardly grow up in our times without knowing this, in the developed countries, anyway. But I don't think what it is is really the important issue at the moment. I think we should rather be focussing on what it it not.

We all learned in primary school the difference between the definition of a square and that of a rectangle, didn't we? For the sake of argument I'm going to assume we did. Maybe some of you were gazing out the window that day, thinking about your new puppy. Whatever. You can look it up if you really aren't aware of it. But the important thing is that although all squares are necessarily rectangles, not all rectangles are necessarily squares. And, just as the larger set includes, but is not limited to, the smaller, so the set of Israelis is not coextensive with the set of Jews.

I'm willing to concede for the sake of argument that every Israeli is Jewish, although really I very much doubt this is the case. It would be a rare country indeed that had a truly homogenous population in any demographic. But I'm willing to grant that we may consider Israelis as all Jewish, if we find that helpful, although personally, I don't think it is really relevant to anything in the news just now. But it is far from being the case that all Jews are Israelis. Good heavens, Jews are everywhere. We have Australian Jews, and those people are Australians, just as the English ones are English, the French ones are French, azo azif. Jews are not all Israeli, any more than every dark skinned person is African. It is a nonsense.

Having got that out of the way, I'd like to direct your attention to the definition endorsed by 39 Australian universities. It's quoted in the link I gave you above, but the thing I want to focus on is that it explicitly includes Holocaust denial as an antisemitic act. 

I don't have any quarrel with this. The Holocaust was arguably the most terrible and shameful event in human history, and it continues to cause intergenerational trauma today. Even those of us who were not born at the time of it still feel its horrible effects. The cold, sick feeling you get at the sight of a swastika. The shyness and almost embarrassment you feel visiting a synagogue, if you're not Jewish yourself. Our acceptance that although our church invited everyone from the synagogue up the road to our service, not a single person from that congregation came, even though lots of us had been to their events and met people there, even though their rabbi was being our guest preacher that day. No one was surprised, although we were a bit sad. 

So yes, denying the Holocaust is antisemitic. I feel it in my bones. 

Given that, though, there have been claims that criticism of the Israeli state's actions in Gaza are also antisemitic. Many claims. And this strikes me as somewhat hypocritical. We are all encouraged to remember, and to condemn, the Holocaust. But our reason for condemning it is not because Jews were the victims of it. It is even bigger than that. We condemn and regret the Holocaust because it was wrong, evil. And if Israel's actions in Gaza are also wrong, they are just as deserving of condemnation, and it doesn't make any difference whether the perpetrators are Jewish, or Americans, or little green men from outer space. If it's wrong, it's wrong. And condemning evil qua evil cannot be antisemitic. To argue that it could, would be to argue that Jews were evil, which in itself would be practically a poster child for antisemitism. 

So let's all take a deep breath and reach for whatever tiny rudiments of logic we managed to take away from primary school. 

It Was You All The Time.

When I logged in to Facebook this morning, I noticed a number of American people saying things such as 'I no longer identify as American'... 'I plan to move to [insert person's favourite foreign country]'... and of course the old favourite, 'not my president'. 

My kneejerk was to feel approving. In a democracy, surely it's a good thing if people in general realise it when their country is being badly run. It is a good thing, right? Just as personal outrage can fuel large, scary life changes, such as leaving an abusive spouse, so societal outrage can fuel large political movements. We need the energy that righteous anger gives us to drive our actions, when those actions are daunting.

When I think about it a little more, though, I find it deeply disturbing. Looking at America today, from outside as of course I do, I see so many, and so strong, parallels to prewar Germany that it just isn't funny. I have been seeing this for a long time, of course, but these days I am finding myself among the mainstream. One can hardly go online without seeing someone comparing Trump to Hitler. And there's a part of me that still feels pleased that at last people are starting to see it, but there is a much bigger part that shrinks from the fact that I believe they are seeing the wrong thing. 

The thing is, however short it may fall of the ideal, America is still at least attempting to present itself as a democracy. And in a democratic government, it's not all down to one person. That's basically the whole idea of democracy, right? You don't have a king, or an emperor, or a dictator or whatever. You have a president, and that president is elected by a (however flawed) democratic process. And the moral result of this is to spread the responsibility right out through the populace. It is the American people who made President Trump possible, just as it was the German people who enabled the rise to power of the NSDAP. The Trumps of the world, the Hitlers, the Duttons, the Abbots, are not the disease; they are the symptom of our societal sickness. And just as these individuals are not single-handedly responsible for their rise to positions of power, we have to face up to the fact that is the people of each nation who helped them to achieve those heights, and we must accept our share of the responsibility for every stupid, vicious thing they do.

So, Americans. Let's not hear so much about your disapproval of the mess your country is in. It's been in trouble for a long, long time, getting worse every year. Let's rather hear about what you plan to do about it. Because this is not something that was done to you, of which you are the helpless victims. No, this is something you did, yourselves. You did it, not just with your votes on election day, but with your compliance, for years, decades, with your culture of greed, of fear, of celebrity worship, of dehumanising Blacks, gays, women, children and other groups, of 'rendition', of torture of prisoners, of grabbing everything you could get regardless of who then went without.

It was you all the time.