The Ones Who Walk Away From Omanatnaug

The link I posted in my reply to Iain to the previous post, didn't work; which gives me an excuse to belabour the point about one guy in a cage and orange overalls being a scapegoat in the war on terror. Well, I'm both burning and waving the flag for the

I don't know if it's because the Australian government likes to single people out to be made examples of. If I was conspirational enough, I'd weave a fancy parallel with the asylum seeker kept in a cabin in Nauru. The time periods kept in isolation are roughly the same and they both demonstrate the government's 'toughness'. There again, they can't deflect criticism for acts of persecution and a failure of will to defend the rights of all, in exchange for a partisan show of hands.

The duty of citizens to themselves, to their community, to their country, and to the planet is not fixedly or primarily to the government of the day. You don't want to block your govt's money bill, stick papers in a hostile Senate where they get pulled apart and put back together wrong, prevent them from carrying adminstrative functions out economically and efficiently. But neither do you want them to hang their agenda in place of the nation's (in other words, in place of ours), and that unspoken sense of what is right; I enjoy seeing the message 'Creative Dissent' scrawled where I work and where students study. I think that's the way 'Creative Dissent'. And if that doesn't include sample victims (and there's been quite a Rau, which is good) then so much the better.

I've come here this time to congratulate the Australian public.