Not My Brother's Keeper
Wednesday, August 15, 2001
Who’d want Mr Ruddock’s job? We curse him for imprisoning innocent asylum seekers. Yes, by Australian standards, these people are being treated abominably.
Equally though, we’d curse him if Australia were now heaving with the millions who’d come if there were no such barrier.
How can we be so two-faced? The answer is simple: it’s because we are already living a contradiction. We call ourselves Christians, humanists, socialists, defenders of human rights and dignity, etc. But the truth is, the world is still divided into nations. The quality of life of some nations is still hugely different from that of others.
Most of the time we don’t know or care — and don’t want to know — how far-away nations live. The human race is still deeply tribal.
So please let us stop kidding ourselves. A global human society is still far from reality: most people have never even considered it. To ever make such a world, we’d have to re-invent some very fundamental values: property, nationality, sovereignty, human race, justice.
Either we start talking about a new human commonwealth, or else we continue (hoping not to be called hypocrites) to appoint gate-keepers whose job is to deny the Australian standard of living to many doorknockers who are just as deserving as most of us. What’s it to be?
Philip O'Carroll