This Christmas 2023, Launcestonians, like the late Queen Elizatheth II did in 1992, when the city's current Mayor was just beyond being a 'babe-ion-arms', they have every reasons to put it down as being an annus horribilis year.
Fiscally the serial and surreal misWHATEVERS of the not so recent past have come back to haunt their culprits with the wages of their follies – and they have been many and various. Their coffers are bare and they a denying their debt as the bailiff bangs upon their doors looking for something to give the ratepayers to compensate for their losses.
One player has departed stage right and within the ranks of underlings others have joined the exodus. Indeed, the days when a councilJOB was a goodJOB is all too fast a fading memory. So what does one do in such times? In China it is quite likely that all the doors at Town Hall would be painted "red".
The colour “red” usually reminds us of the source of life on the earth ... the red sun. This is true both within Eurocentric and Chinese cultural sensibilities. The sun brings life, warmth, and vitality. So paint the doors “red” to celebrate life, happiness, warmth, auspiciousness and so on and it will come.
However it is more likely that "purple" would be the colour given that it is the colour associated with royalty, entitlement, nobility, luxury, power, and ambition. It is the colour the 'fiscal-accountant-in-residence' -– FAIR ... strange acronym but their we go – campaigns under and the significance of that is not lost on ratepayer CITIZENwhoever. It is especially so when it is deemed that CITIZENwhoever asks too many questions and sometimes socially one or other of the somewhat Medieval 'cabal of the entitled' (COTE) will cross a crowded room to deliver that pompous edict.
At Council's final meeting for 2023,in frustration and despair CITIZENDickenson called this out for the "rubbish" it is and CITIZENRodgers called the COTE out for their obfuscation and yet again CITIZENwhoever feels the pain in their wallets in the malaise born of entitlement, unaccountability and the obliviousness they must struggle with.
Curiously, this COTE perpetrates this class of perversity among themselves by all accounts. Sadly, the victims turn out to be the city's ratepayers because their hard earned get to be fritted away on sustaining the status quo. One fiscal folly at a time they indulge themselves in self-importance while the 'lifters' around the table are suppressed as CITIZENwhoever is derided for asking far too many questions.
Somewhere in the world of wisdom someone pointed out that the most fatal illusion of all is the settled point of view, Life is growth and motion, so a fixed point of view, the status quo, kills anybody who hold one. Albeit that the truth is, given time the expiration may well take time.
Alternatively, as van Gogh realised, we have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?”
Emblazon on Alexander the Great's tomb “A tomb now suffices him for whom the world was not enough." It might well have been Epicurus who inspired that epitaph ... “Nothing is sufficient for the person who finds sufficiency too little.”
Those suffering distress as a consequence of failed and failing governance, suffer the loss of their HOMEplace, the loss of their human right to a 'home' because of those who have sufficient seeing their need for more. Albeit that like Alexander their tombs will share his epitaph. The irony is lost upon those who just cannot acknowledge the hand they deal out to those in who have lost a home and those who might well yet.
Epicurus asserted that philosophy's purpose is to attain as well as to help others attain happy, tranquil lives characterised by 'ataraxia' – peace and freedom from fear – and the absence of pain. He advocated that people were best able to pursue his way of being in the world by living a self-sufficient life surrounded by friends. And that was a couple of millennia ago.
It is lamentable that currently, none of this it seems is anything like what placemaking looks like around the decision making table located in Launceston's Town Hall. Ataraxia, what is that and what is it to do with us?
Sadly, those 'representatives' with a thespian bent are unlikely to covet truth or see it as a distinguished passion or even seek wisdom from Shakespeare 'the bard' – Antony and Cleopatra, act 1, sc. 5 – and admit that it was/is “Those were my salad days. When I was green in judgement” or to live in that bitter solitude which is painful in youth, but for some it becomes more and more delicious as the years mount like it does for a great wine.
A place's destiny and its placedness is not determined by the number of times its cultural landscapers STUFFup but by the number of times the real placemakers manage to rise up, dust themselves off, and move forward albeit against the odds.
Geography shapes cultural realities and in turn cultures shape landscapes. In Launceston this has been going on for millennia with much of the current cultural landscape bearing the scars of 'the place' being an exploitative heroic colonial enterprise driven from elsewhere. And that is not forgetting that on the kanamalukaTamar/Esk in lutruwitaTASMANIA a city sits upon land where 'sovereignty' remains unseeded.
Epicurus, if he were to arise from his tomb, might not find much to impress him but it is what it is. Speculatively, Epicurus, might well have been been impressed by the fecundity and the ataraxia that preceded the colonial heroics but that too it is what it is. Pun intended, the 'mare's nest' that is the Launcestonian placescapers' cavern of dystopia embedded as it is in the status quo of unsustainability must be disrupted.
Nevertheless justice will not be well served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are, albeit that at times hell looks like it might well freeze over first despite climate change.
To imagine 2023 as an annus horribilis year is not drawing too long a bow. As is often said, the best way to predict the future is to invent it. The question hanging here is in whose hands can, and will, that enterprise be entrusted?
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