Look away or do something

Drawing a long bow from Gaza to Upfield

If you wonder if you should ignore some horror or do something about it, try asking yourself this: If I were the victim of this horror, what would I want bysanders to do? If I were the criminal carrying out the horror, what would I want bystanders to do?

I think, in almost every case the answers would be something like “something, anything at all” to question one and “nothing” to question two.

That ought to make it easy for us then.

A little while ago I read a beautiful, quite short article about the benefits of protest. From memory, the message was that you have no idea what effect your protest is having. It might not have the direct effect that you want it to have, but it has some effect even so. Protesters in their millions could not stop our war criminal leaders invading Iraq in 2003 but they may well have stopped them invading Iran the year after. Who knows? If governments commit horrors and nobody protests, who will stop their next horror?

Every week pro-Palestine, anti-genocide rallies have been held in Melbourne since October 2023. What effect have they had? The genocide continues and the legacy media and almost all of our elected representatives ignore the atrocity and the chilling, murderous talk of the Israeli government. But who knows? Maybe Israel would have been even more murderous by now. Maybe our government would have given them more material and moral support and bragged about it.

We don’t know and we probably never will. But we take to the streets because it’s the right thing to do for other people and because it’s the right thing for us.

It may seem trite to include this story in a post about genocide, but it’s something I can’t get out of my head. Anyone who lives in Melbourne’s north will know about the hundreds of millions that have spent to improve the Upfield Line in recent years. Level crossings have been taken out and services improved. But in the late 80s and 90s the Victorian government was dead keen to close the line altogether. An Age editorial of the time bemoaned the waste of having a train line running parallel and close to the Sydney Road tram for several kilometers. Imagine it, people being able to choose between catching a tram or a train. How dare they!

One cold and sunny Saturday in 1989 I marched with a few hundred others up Sydney Road to protest this proposed closure. What a hopeless cause we had! This was in the time of the Cain Labor government which would soon get rid of tram conductors. There was no will to improve public transport. Norm Gallagher, the disgraced leader of the Builders Labourers’ Federation (BLF) (there was no CFMEU in those days) joined us. He may or may not have strengthened our case.

But our cause was just and have a look at the Upfield Line now.