21. Roar – Katy Perry 2013
You held me down, but I got up
Already brushing off the dust
You hear my voice, you hear that sound
Like thunder, gonna shake the ground
You held me down, but I got up
Get ready 'cause I've had enough
I don’t like discussing politics too broadly. This is
Australia and we all have the right to vote for who we wish without intimidation
and, quiet frankly, it’s my business who I vote for, not yours.
As such,
the only time I’ve waded into politics in this blog has been when: communicating
the original inspiration for the blog (Post
1); pondering the issues that the media decided to focus on during the period
of Australia’s first female PM (Post
2); considering that famous misogyny speech in the Australian parliament (Post
6); a recent similar speech in the American parliament (Post
16); and, finally, the recent rape of Brittany Higgins in Parliament House
(Post
19).
Okay, so maybe politics do
feature pretty high in my thoughts of gender differences/equality.
Over the last couple of weeks we’ve
had the misfortune of feeling the need to participate in the March 4 Justice.
As a Canberran I greatly appreciated the opportunity to go direct to Australia’s
parliament to openly engage with our Prime Minister on the issue. Unfortunately,
he opted to remain hidden away from the crowd requesting his attention and
delivered a tone deaf speech stating that we’re lucky to not be meet by armed police/military
as in other countries(?)!
This comment
shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Sco Mo had definitely already missed the
mark a few weeks earlier by hiding behind having a wife and daughters when
addressing the Brittany Higgins rape allegation. Additional sexist allegations
have been made against the other side of the political
divide.
What really concerns me is that
politicians are elected by us, the broader community, to represent us. What
does this say about society as a whole if this is the quality of the people we
elect? Is Australian society still just hiding away from the issue of rape,
gender based violence and the like? As @KerriSackville discusses in this excellent
opinion piece, Sco Mo needs to stop letting us know how much he
cares about his mother, wife and daughters, and start demonstrating that he
cares about all of the women he has been elected to represent.
Unfortunately Australians are not
alone on this front. Just last week British women holding a peaceful vigil for
a woman murdered while walking home were man
handled by those employed to protect them.
What hope does ‘Oh my God! A
woman!’ have of safely walking home, if police are prepared to forcibly
remove women for participating in a peaceful vigil?
Of course they’ve hidden behind
the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic to justify their heavy handed actions, but,
ironically, in trying to break the vigil participants up for fear of them
spreading the virus, they pushed them all tightly together and forcibly removed
them, thus increasing the chances of spreading the virus.
As political correspondent Brett Worthington states in his excellent
article, ‘the early signs of an earthquake can often be easy to miss’, so
if we maintain the momentum they will hear us roar.
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