No Alan Jones. I am not a cyber-bully.

Thinky thoughts today about Alan Jones and the furore that has erupted both over his comments and the unprecedented social media campaign around them.

People have many different opinions about this and it’s not all straight forward lefties on one side and righties on the other.

But there is an argument out there that the social media campaign that has sprung up targeting Jones’s sponsors is threatening our freedom of speech (and perhaps association). Jones and 2GB themselves have railed today against this ‘cyber-bullying’ and how this is putting innocent people out of work and damaging business.

Allow me to vehemently and completely disagree.

We live in a world where much of our public policy is affected by private money and corporate influence. Where radio personalities like Alan Jones can and have wielded out-of-proportion influence to the audiences they represent. And where this does and has had a very, very real impact on our world, on what we’ve been able to achieve and on how we’ve been able to tackle very important and challenging societal problems.

The all-powerful narrative of the buck and the market means that everything these days must be reduced to a dollar figure to be understood and valued. We are treated by both politicians and the market as consumers first, and human beings very much later.

This reality has meant that people like Jones, and the big corporates have been able to ride democracy their own way for a very long time. They have big pulpits  bought with big money and with big microphones that they use to push their own (mostly conservative) agendas, often at the expense of the facts and the best interest of the rest of the community. The rest of the community – numbering in our millions – have had no real voice at all outside of the voting booth and our ability to band together over common interest.

Jones in particular has used his big microphone to sprout religious intolerance, racial vilification, sexism, and the most vile abuse towards a Prime Minister I’ve witnessed since I can remember being old enough to be politically aware.

And up until now he has done it with complete immunity and without the consequences that most of the rest of the world would have to wear for disgracing themselves and their employers.

Let’s face it – Jones has had a pretty sweet (and free) ride – up to now.

Social media changes things. It gives everyone a voice. Anyone with access to the internet can post a comment, send an email, tweet or facebook their thoughts. We can blog – and many bloggers have bigger audiences these days than traditional media personalities. It’s the way of the new world. It poses incredible challenges (such as how rife actual cyber-bullying and trolling is). But it also poses incredible opportunities for free speech such as we’ve never seen before. Now anyone who can write can have as big a microphone as Jones has enjoyed for years.

So colour me unimpressed that Alan now feels he’s being cyber-bullied.  No Alan – you’re not. You’ve mistaken my right to do business with whom I choose with bullying. Real cyber-bullying is very different.

Here it is in a sentence– after decades of turning us all into consumers and using that power to make over our society in the corporate image and damage those things that many of us hold dear, no one now has the right to turn around and claim I’m bullying them by exercising my right as a consumer to do business with whom I want.

You cannot make me into a ‘consumer’ and then cry foul when I use my ‘consumer’ influence to stand for what is important to me. You don’t get to be that much of a hypocrite.

I’m sure it must get up their noses. I’m sure it must really make them mad – this idea that we ‘consumers’ have found a way through all this corporate bile to utilise the system to stand up for a more decent and respectful societal discourse. They built a cross for their own backs, and now they don’t want to carry it?

That’s the power of social media.

Let me make it clear – I don’t deny Alan Jones his right to say whatever he wants. But by God – I claim my right to use the methods at my disposal (social media and the power of my dollar) to talk as loudly as he does. And to stand, finally, against the religious intolerance, science-denialism, anti-environmentalism, sexism and hateful rhetoric that he sprouts on a daily basis. If that has the follow-on effect of losing Jones and 2GB money and perhaps even shutting his show down, then he and his corporate mates own responsibility for that. Not me or those like me who are merely standing for what we believe in. He has the option after all of expressing his different opinions in a more respectful, polite and non-sexist way. I have a right to not do business with companies who support him while he chooses disrespectful and damaging rhetoric.

That doesn’t make me a cyber-bully.
Nor does it make me a danger to freedom of speech.

In fact it makes me a champion of free speech.

And actually that’s not just a thought.

Over and out.

We Fucked UP! Hooray!

Thinky thoughts today about joy – about how we wait for it. About how elusive it sometimes seems. And about negativity. About the way our thoughts get mistaken for reality.

Nothing new here in these thoughts. But occasionally in life you have the moments when things coalesce for you a bit. When life seems to sing out a song of ‘you’re onto something’. 

Today is one of those days. Okay I admit – it helps that it’s a beautiful sunny day and there’s probably something in that which has affected the chemical mix in my brain and organised things internally so that some thoughts come more quickly to the surface than others.

I’ve never been one to dwell too much into the depths of the genetic and chemical makeup of the human being. That’s for others. For me, reducing everything to mere physics and biology doesn’t help to navigate the practicalities of the world. My ocean is one of emotions, thoughts, spirituality, essence.

So today I want to talk about joy.

I’m a big one for creating our own realities. I think that what we believe becomes thought and what we think dictates action and how we act pulls things in towards us or repels them away. So you can really want to be very rich but if you hold problematic beliefs about the nature of money, then you will probably find yourself unable to manifest it for yourself or hold onto it for very long.

Similarly for love and almost any human endeavour.

This isn’t about sugary positive affirmations to cover things up – this is more a genuine, conscious relationship with your own inner world to learn how your beliefs affect what you’re experiencing in the world. No number of positive affirmations in my opinion can disguise what you really think and feel.
But that way of being in the world relies on always driving the creation of things in your life. And sometimes driving them very hard.

And today I’ve been thinking about joy. Which seems to me to be less about driving and more about being. Less about actively creating our lives but of about enjoying them. And it seems to me that joy also comes with acceptance and an openness to something other than what you think you need in life at any given moment. 

If we’re driving really hard to Point A we may miss that Point B is infinitely more interesting. If we think what we really need is to be X, we may miss the joy that comes with being Y.

We’re a bundle of contradicting cultural and social pressures, us humans, mixed in with genetics and parenting styles. In amongst all that, joy can seem utterly elusive. Look outside of yourself for one moment and you’re bound to be assailed by countless different perspectives and many of them will tell you what’s completely and utterly wrong with you and the world we live in.
You’re bad because you’re single. You’re bad because you’re a woman. You’re bad because you don’t have a kid. You’re bad if you’re a man and you cry. You’re bad if you’re too thin. You’re bad if you’re too heavy. You’re bad if you buy this t-shirt. You’re bad if you don’t. You’re bad if you’re this sort of artist. You’re bad if you’re that sort. You’re just bad.

Don’t paint your toe-nails? Bad.
Paint them? How superficial are you.
Didn’t finish that bit of work you had to do? Lazy.
Work too hard? Work-a-holic loser. Life is about spontenaity.

Yes, it is pretty much guaranteed that in this emotionally and psychologically damaged cultural collective that you will find someone who can pinpoint twenty reasons in five minutes why you should be really down on yourself. They’ll also probably tell you how to fix it. Now do you have a bunch of stuff you could be doing better and more effectively? Probably. We all do.

I, for instance, am probably the single most disorganised person I know. I can’t organise my way out of a bucket. It’s problematic because I have so much I want to achieve but I’m just goddam lazy sometimes and other times I genuinely don’t think of things ahead of time. Things sneak up on me and suddenly, as much as I think I’ve got things sorted, there’s twenty things I need to do and I needed to do them yesterday. 

Fines collect up on my desk because I forget to pay them. I have a jacket in my cupboard which has needed to be taken to the dry-cleaner for about twelve months. I’ve got shoes I don’t wear because I haven’t gotten around to fixing them. Yup, I’m my parent’s most disorganised child and a cause of much exasperation.

And yes, there are emotional issues I should be well on top of at this point. Well on top of. I mean how old am I? Five? 
But you know what – I’m pretty freaking awesome anyway. 

So are you – whoever you are reading this right now, no matter what’s going on in your life, with all your ‘problems’ and challenges and fuck-ups and failures – you’re pretty freaking awesome. Hey – as we say in the impro world – we fucked up! Hooray!!! Maybe that’s joy.

You know what else is joy? Being easy on each other. Not telling ourselves or each other off for shortcomings. Allowing someone else to fuck up without making it important that they did. Letting someone be human. Letting someone be imperfect. Loving them anyway. Letting ourselves make mistakes and loving ourselves anyway. Doing the wrong thing and forgiving yourself. Allowing yourself to forgive someone else too. Yeh, that’s definitely joy.

And I reckon what we create from that space is infinitely better for us and our community. 

Lets free ourselves from this misery of having to be anything other than exactly who we are. Lets just be joy.

Just a thought.