A few weeks ago, just as the leader of the supposedly free world was doing his best gameshow host will-he-won’t-he? routine on whether he’d bomb Iran, I was on a plane home from Europe while my partner and our child were mid-air on two other flights.
This felt surreal and dangerously uncertain. International aeroplane travel messes with your head at the best of times, warping the clock and largely cocooning you from earthly happenings. But taking off into that communications black hole with my family in other parts of the air amid atmospherics that seemed decidedly pre-possible global conflagration was especially discombobulating.
The what ifs were endless and imponderable. It’s time for us all to be home with the dogs at our feet and the kettle on, I kept telling myself. Just get us all home where it’s safe.
Looking out of the aircraft window I’d never been so pleased to see the blue-green Australian continental edge and to then pass 10,000 metres over its hazy ochre interior snaked through with waterways and dotted with dry lake beds.
These last few years especially, despite the vacuity and cheap partisanship of so much that passes for local civic discourse and debate, Australia’s geographic fortune – and the blind luck of being born here – has never seemed more pronounced. So much so that it can be tempting to breathe a sigh of relief on reaching the shores of home and then to keep looking away from the world’s pain and peril.
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There is an entrenched Australian historical denial that has harboured a national penchant to look away from our nation’s genocidal crimes against the oldest continuous civilisation on Earth. We must not as a nation or individuals, due to the tyranny of distance, do likewise regarding global theatres where it is legitimately argued to be happening elsewhere.
From the senseless, remorseless, apparently endless killings of tens of thousands of Gazans in the Israel-Hamas war. To Ukraine’s siege by a despotic Russia. To the missiles and drones exploding across the Middle East. To the galloping transformation of America into autocracy and the erosion of freedoms at its foundational heart. The temptation back here can be to turn away. To take solace in our cocooned comfort and safety.
To sit by the hearth with your back to the news about the other end of the world is pretty alluring right now.
Landing back in Australia just before the gameshow host did launch his missiles, walking my streets safely while knowing my family was secure, enjoying a continuous life of plenty, my mood began to gather an onerous darkness when I should’ve been jubilant with post-holiday joy.
Preoccupations that arise in a life of such privilege – anxieties over creative projects, about the happiness and health of our children and pets, about societal transgressions such as the tree vandals in our neighbourhood’s midst – feel trite, comparatively meaningless and nauseatingly self-indulgent.
There’s another word for it: guilt. But accompanying the guilt is a sense of helplessness – a powerlessness to change the world so that the men (it’s mostly men) responsible for the inhumanity and pain might be reined in or ousted from positions of power.
I know a lot of people who invest considerable time in praying for peace. Others who march for it. Some who do yoga, surf, run, walk, volunteer at animal shelters, aged care homes or food banks broadly in the name of peace – to help create better societies, to give back to something bigger than community. They all believe, as I do, that acts of goodwill must have a beneficial global and human – if not quite universal – collateral.
Sure, we can train ourselves to cognitively block out – or at least quarantine – such thoughts of guilt and helplessness, just as we can, in our comfort and safety, turn away from the profound atrocities and human pain that is constantly delivered to us in real time.
But our turned backs are precisely what the perpetrators of atrocity, which is to say the global few with the power to stop the pain, want to see.
We must not give them that, no matter how safe, removed from danger and comfortable we may feel. Look at it squarely. Call it out. Do not turn away.
• Paul Daley is a Guardian Australia columnist
