Jacqui Lambie: 'I’ll pledge my loyalty to Australia and its peoples' Australia Day message - 2016

26 January 2016, Tasmania, Australia

G’Day! Let’s celebrate our Australia Day with pride and say our oath of allegiance.

From this time forward, under God, I’ll pledge my loyalty to Australia and its peoples, whose democratic beliefs I share, whose rights and liberties I respect, and whose laws I will uphold and obey.

Remember, if you don’t like our democratic rights, liberties and laws, equality for all, including women, gay, and Indigenous people, there are plenty of other countries to choose from.

Keep safe and have a happy Australia Day.

Stan Grant: 'But every time we are lured into the light, we are mugged by the darkness of this country's history', Ethics Centre IQ2 debate - 2015

27 October 2015, City Recital Hall, Sydney, Australia

This speech was delivered in an IQ2 debate with the topic, 'Racism is destroying the Australian dream'. Also for the affirmative was Pallavi Sinha. For the negative was Jack Thompson and Rita Panahi. The full debate is here. 

Thank you. Thank you so much for coming along this evening, and I'd also like to extend my respects to my Gadigal brothers and sisters from my people, the Wiradjuri people.

In the winter of 2015, Australia turned to face itself. it looked into its soul and it had to ask this question. Who are we? What sort of a country do we want to be.

And this happened in a place that is most holy, most sacred to Australians. It happened on the sporting field, it happened on the football field. Suddenly the front page was on the back page, it was in the grandstand.

Thousands of voices rose to hound an indigenous man, a man who was told he wasn’t Australian, a man who was told he wasn’t Australian of the Year.

And they hounded that man into submission.

I can’t speak for the what lay in the hearts of the people who booed Adam Goodes. But I can tell you what we heard when we heard those boos.

We heard a sound that is very familiar to us.

We heard a howl.

We heard a howl that of humiliation has echoes across two centuries of dispossession, injustice, suffering and survival.

We heard the howl of the Australian dream, and it said to us again, you’re not welcome.

The Australian dream.

We sing of it, and we recite it in verse.

Australians all let us rejoice for we are young and free.

My people die young in this country, we die ten years younger than average Australians and we are far from free.

We are fewer than three percent of the Australian population and yet we are 25 percent, a quarter of those Australians locked up in our prisons, and if you are a juvenile it is worse, it’s fifty percent. An indigenous child is more likely to be locked up in prison than they are to finish high school.

I love a sunburned country

A land of sweeping plains

Of rugged mountain ranges

It reminds me that my people were killed on those plains, we were shot on those plains, disease ravaged us on those plains. I come from those plains. I come from a people west of the Blue Mountains, the Wiradjuri people, where in the 1820s the soldiers and settlers waged a war of extermination against my people. Yes, a war of extermination! That was the language used at the time, go to the Sydney Gazette, and look it up, and read about it. Martial law was declared, and my people could be shot on sight.

Those rugged mountain ranges, my people, women and children were herded over those ranges to their deaths.

The Australian dream.

The Australian dream is rooted in racism. It is the very foundation of the dream. It is there at the birth of the nation . It is there in terra nullius.  An empty land. A land for the taking.

Sixty thousand years of occupation.

A people who made the first seafaring journey in the history of mankind.

A people of law, a people of lore, a people of music and art and dance and politics, none of it mattered.

Because our rights were extinguished because we were not here according to British law. And when British people looked at us, they saw something subhuman, and if we were human at all, we occupied the lowest rung on civilisation’s ladder.

We were fly blown, stone age savages and that was the language that was used.

Charles Dickens, the great writer of the age, when referring to the noble savage of which we were counted among, said ‘it would be better that they be wiped off the face of the earth’. Captain Arthur Phillip, a man of enlightenment, a man who was instructed to make peace with the so called natives in a matter of years, was sending out raiding parties with instruction ‘bring back the severed heads of the black troublemakers’.

They were smoothing the dying pillow.  

My people were rounded up and put on missions, from where, if you escaped. You were hunted down, you were roped and tied and dragged back, and it happened here, it happened on the mission that my grandmother and great grandmother were from, the Warrengesda on the Darling Point of the Murrumbidgee River.

Read about it. It happened.

By 1901 when we became a nation, when we federated the colonies, we were nowhere. We’re not in the Constitution, save for ‘Race Provisions’ -- which allowed for laws to be made that would take our children, that would invade our privacy, that would tell us who we could marry and tell us where we could live.

The Australian dream.

By 1963, the year of my birth, the dispossession was continuing. Police came at gunpoint under cover of darkness to Mapoon an aboriginal community in Queensland, and they ordered people from their homes, and they burned those homes to the ground, and they gave the land to a bauxite mining company. And today those people remember that as ‘The Night of the Burning’.

In 1963 when I was born, I was counted amongst the flora and fauna, not among the citizens of this country.

Now you will hear things tonight, you will hear people say, ‘but you’ve done well!’

Yes I have, and I’m proud of it, and why have I done well?

I’ve done well because of who came before me.

I’ve done well because of my father, who lost the tips off three fingers working in saw mills to put food on our table, because he was denied an education.

My grandfather, who served to fight wars for this country when he was not yet a citizen and came back to a segregated land where he couldn’t even share a drink with his digger mates in the pub because he was black.

My great grandfather who was jailed for speaking his language to his grandson - my father - jailed for it!

My grandfather on my mother’s side who married a white woman who reached out to Australia, lived on the fringes of town, until the police came, put a gun to his head, bulldozed his tin humpy, and ran over over the graves of the three children he’d buried there.

That’s the Australian dream. I have succeeded in spite of the Australian dream, not because of it; and I have succeeded because of those people.

You might hear tonight, ‘but you have white blood in you.’ And if the white blood in me was here tonight, my grandmother, she would  tell you of how she was turned away from a hospital giving birth to her first child because she was giving birth to the child of a black person.

The Australian dream. We’re better than this.

I’ve have seen the worst of the world as a reporter. I’ve spent a decade in war zones, from Iraq to Afghanistan, and Pakistan. We are an extraordinary country, we are in so many respects the envy of the world. If I were sitting here, where my friends are tonight (gestures to opponents] I would be arguing passionately for this country.

But I stand here with my ancestors, and the view looks very different from where I stand.

The Australian dream.

We have our heroes.

Albert Namatjira painted the soul of this nation.

Vincent Lingiari put his hand out for Gough Whitlam to pour the sand of his country through his fingers, and say ‘this is my country’.

Cathy Freeman lit the torch for the Olympic Games.

But every time we are lured into the light, we are mugged by the darkness of this country's history.

Of course racism is killing the Australian dream! It is self evident that it is killing the Australian dream.

But we are better than that.

The people who stood up and supported Adam Goodes and said, ‘no more’, they are better than that.

The people who marched across the bridge for reconciliation, they are better than that.

The people who supported Kevin Rudd when he said sorry to the Stolen Generations, they are better than that.

My children and their non indigenous friends are better than that.

My wife who is non indigenous is better than that.

And one day I want to stand here, and be able to say as proudly and sing as loudly as anyone in this room, Australians all let us rejoice.

Thanks you.

Stan Grant was a wonderful guest on episode 8 of the podcast, talking about this speech.

Deng Thiak Adut: 'For them the freedom from fear was death. I was lucky' Australia Day address - 2016

21 January 2016, Sydney Conservatorium of Music, Australia

Firstly, I would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of this land, past and present, the Gadiga people of the Eor nation.

Ten years ago, Clover Moore, the lord mayor of Sydney, talked at the National Maritime Museum. She said:

'Today, as we mark the beginning of Refugee Week, it is important to remember that all non‐Indigenous Australians are immigrants to this land.'

She continued, 'From the perspective of thousands of years of Aboriginal custodianship, the rest of us are newcomers'. I wonder what the Gadigal people in 1788 thought as they watched sailing ships coming up their harbour? Did they realise that their civilisation was about to be uprooted? Did they watch with interest and wonder? How soon did that interest turn to mortal fear?

It has been a 200-year journey for their descendants to reassert the right to be free of those fears, to acclaim pride in their traditions. That's a long wait.

The theme of this year's Australia Day address is that freedom from fear is very special to all of us. To appreciate the value of freedom one must first be denied it. To know real fear gives special meaning and yearning to being free of fear.

So what does 'freedom from fear' entail for you and me as Australians, or those who 'want to be Australians' in 2016?

Let me share with you parts of my story. It may be unfamiliar to those who have been born and grown up in a peaceful Australia. To those who have come as refugees from the world's trouble spots, parts of this story will be too familiar. A point of this story is to emphasise how very lucky we are to enjoy freedom from fear, and how very unlucky are many, many others who neither choose, nor deserve their fate.

I was born in a small fishing village called Malek, in the South Sudan. My father was a fisherman and we had a banana farm. I am one of eight children born to Mr Thiak Adut Garang and Ms Athieu Akau Deng. So the parts of my name are drawn from both my parents. My given name is Deng which means god of the rain. In those parts of this wide brown land that are short of water my name might be a good omen. I have a nickname: Auoloch, which means swallow. Alas I couldn't fly and as a young boy, about the age of a typical second grader in Sydney, I was conscripted into an army.

As they took me away from my home and family I didn't even understand what freedoms I had lost. I didn't understand how fearful I should have been. I was young. I was ignorant. I lost the freedom to read and write. I lost the freedom to sing children's songs. I lost the right to be innocent. I lost the right to be a child.

Instead, I was taught to sing war songs. In place of the love of life I was taught to love the death of others. I had one freedom – the freedom to die and I'll return to that a little later.

I lost the right to say what I thought. In place of 'free speech', I was an oppressor to those who wanted to express opinions that were different to those who armed me, fed me, told me what to think, where to go and what to do.

And there was something else very special to me that was taken away. I was denied the right to become an initiated member of my tribe. The mark of 'inclusiveness' was denied to me.

I had to wait until I became an Australian citizen to know that I belonged.

As an Australian I am proud that we have a national anthem. It's ours and to hear it played and sung is to feel pride, pride that we are a nation of free people. It has a historical background that is familiar to those who grew up here, but which is not easily understood by newcomers. I found it useful to take some lines from our anthem to bring together what I want to share with you.

To be here today, talking about freedom from fear, about the rewards that come from thinking 'inclusively', rather than thinking 'divisively', is to achieve something that the child conscript Deng could not imagine.

I came to Australia as an illiterate, penniless teenager, traumatised physically and emotionally by war. In Sudan, I was considered legally disabled, only by virtue of being black or having a dark skin complexion. As you can see I am very black and proud of my dark skin complexion. But in the Sudan my colour meant that my prospects could go no further than a dream of being allowed to finish a primary education. To be a lawyer was unthinkable. Australia opened the doors of its schools and universities. I would particularly like to thank the Western Sydney University where I received my Law degree and the University of Wollongong where I obtained my Masters degree in Law – an experience which enabled me to realise my dream of becoming a court room advocate. Australia educated me. How lucky I became. How lucky is any person who receives an education in a free land and goes on to use it in daily life.

In 1987, the year before the Australian Bi-Centennial celebrations, I was among many young children forcibly removed from their homes and families and marched to Ethiopia, for reasons that were unknown to me at the time. I walked thousands of kilometres without shoes or underwear.

What do we take for granted as Australians? Free education, food, clothing (more than shoes and underwear), shelter , health care and personal safety. We take those things for granted until we don't have them.

I witnessed children like myself dying as we made our way, barefoot and starving. As a child, witnessing the death of a relative is something that stays with you for life. Even today, I remember the deadened face and the gaunt skeletal body of one of my nephews lying on a corn sack. I saw too much abuse and death among my friends during the war. I sustained physical abuse from my superiors because of my inability to follow orders and for demanding decent treatment. I was a child soldier and I was expected to kill or be killed.

Within a year I was plagued by disease and malnutrition. I felt isolated and deserted. I remember being told off by one of my close relatives in 1989 because I was poking him with my protruding bones. He too was a forced conscript. We were stationed in a camp in Western Ethiopia that was disguised as though it was a refugees' camp. He told me I should just die. I understand now that he too was suffering from depression and by caring for me he was unable to improve his own situation. By this time, I could only take fluids. I feel sorry for my relative. I do not believe that he was trying to be cruel. He was just a child too, unable to properly look after me or himself.

In those days, what I needed was a loving parent. What child, taken away from the care of his or her parents will not suffer some form of psychological trauma? What child, merely seven years of age and ordered to witness deaths by firing squads will not suffer a lasting injury? What child, upon seeing dead bodies, lying in pools of moving blood, will not suffer some sort of long term psychological damage?

Around 1993, I watched some boys, only 10 or 11 years old, as they picked up their AK47s, put the gun to their heads, squeezed the trigger with their own fingers and blew out their brains. In a better world those fingers might have made music in a place such as this hall, built homes, operated the equipment of scientific discovery. Instead their short lives were as nothing – innocents destroyed. I, consumed by fear, couldn't pull a trigger myself, because I was too scared. Yes, fear saved me. But I understand why they did it. For my fellow child soldiers, pulling the trigger was the quickest way to die and for them the thought of dying was better than the reality of living.

I wonder what their spirits would have thought if they saw that I would become a practising lawyer in Australia some 18 years later. I grieve for them. For them the freedom from fear was death. I was lucky. You are too. Freedom from fear is about acceptance of our common identity. For we Australians in 2016 freedom from fear is almost taken for granted. We had better take care to keep it.

Let me turn now from memories of death to messages of hope, first for new arrivals to these shores and then to those who have long called Australia home.

To those recently arrived, do not give up the dream that brought you here. Within every Australian community there are people who were immigrants or whose parents were immigrants. Treat the experiences that brought you here as tough training for the journey of establishing new lives, new families, new careers.

Clover Moore in that same speech I mentioned earlier noted that, 'The Australian national anthem has promised that, for those who've come across the sea, we've boundless plains to share'. Surprise! Surprise! Australia is a nation where most of us, most of the time, seek to give and receive a 'fair go' and 'respect democracy'. It's that 'fair go' that you see in every new Australian success story. That is the 'Advance Australia Fair' in the anthem.

I know that some who are watching and listening will be wondering why I, so black, am ignoring that the ruling majority appear to be white. I don't ignore it, just as I don't ignore that the colours and faces of the Australian community are such a rich palate. Take a trip around an Australian city, visit a building site, walk around an educational campus, look at the names in our sporting teams, and hear, see, smell, and taste the richness of the cultures in any of our shopping centres. White is a colour to which so much can be added.

I remind every youthful migrant to remember and cherish where you came from. It is your grounding, just as important to you as this land is to the traditional owners of this place. Your parents and relatives made sacrifices for your freedom to be here without fear. You must have a dream that takes you up and beyond any past trauma and turmoil. We are special, each and every one of us. You are special to this nation and you ought to listen to your heart and take hold of opportunities.

Of course fears arrive unbidden and unwelcome. We all experience that from time to time. Can we get and keep a job? How do we keep our cherished cultural traditions alive? Can we earn respect? Will we be listened to? But don't fight your fears alone. Here we have the freedom to seek help from new friends, the elders, even a stranger who can be your friend at the time you need them. Remember, fellow immigrants, we begin as strangers in this land and we have much to learn. But the freedoms of this place mean that most of the time, from most people, there is a welcoming hand. So fear not.

That leads me to those who are settled Australians. This past few years there have been unexpected fears, the fears that random atrocities such as those that took place in Bali, and more recently in London, Paris and Istanbul will come here. We scarcely notice the frequency of such acts in other places where terror, not freedom from fear, is the norm.

Fears and doubt are the ideal environment in which to breed misguided obsessions and grand delusions. There is nothing new in such manipulation. It was done to me. Such manipulation of the confused and searching spirit of youth is essential for those who use others in their quest for power.

In responding to tragedies in which the lives of victims and perpetrators alike have been snuffed out to serve some demagogue, we must all be careful not to let local opportunists exploit our emotions with simplistic solutions.

What seems new for we Australians is that the physical barriers to terror such as distance and sea are now irrelevant. But this is just the shortness of memory. These barriers became irrelevant for the traditional owners of this land when the winds and the currents brought the ships of the First Fleet up this Harbour. More recently these barriers were no barriers at all when a midget submarine entered Sydney Harbour during the Second World War.

Then as now freedom from fear is something that must be fought for. It can never be taken for granted. Fighting must sometimes be physical and our War Memorials are testament to those who fought and gave their all. But the first line of defence against consuming fear is always our collective hearts and minds.

And collectively what makes this Nation one to be proud of is the willingness of most in our communities to be accepting, tolerant, inclusive and welcoming. Our anthem speaks of the courage needed to let us all combine. Now is the time.

The fears among us are not limited to terrorism. It is all too clear that partner abuse and child abuse flourished in families where the victims were afraid to speak out. It is not so long ago that gays and lesbians lived in fear of exposure. Attitudes and actions needed to change and that has happened, but there is still more to be done.

This afternoon, I delight in thanking all those whose support for 'freedom from fear' never wavers. These are the people, the people all around us, who freely gave me hope and sustained it. They understand the journey that has brought new arrivals to these shores from war, famine, oppression, and which then becomes the new journey that follows a new path, a path of 'freedom from fear'.

The spirit of giving walks that same path to remind us all about the less fortunate. The reward of freedom from fear has a price: to willingly give for others without hope of anything beyond 'thanks'. This is an obligation that never ends.

One of my early Australian friends illustrates this point. He bought me my first bicycle and got me a job to mow lawns. Geoff died a decade ago, and I shall always remember him for his encouragement, his faith, and his investment in me.

There are now so many friends, colleagues, and teachers who all in different ways have led me here. I thank you all, not only for your help to me but the likely help you have given others too.

Last but not least, my gratitude is to fellow Australians for opening the door, not only to me but to all the other migrants like me. Without your spirit of a fair go, my story could not have been told.

We acquire our community wisdom from our collective, shared experiences.

It's that wisdom, which underlies our entitlement to sing in joyful strains how proud we are today to be Australians.

Let's look at the future. My guru told me to live so that I can build a living memorial for my departed loved ones. There will be a charitable foundation in the name of my murdered brother, John Mac. We will raise funds and take action to alleviate poverty, bring education and better health to the lands where I was born and he died.

I will try to follow in the footsteps of a man who wanted to make things right.

I hope that I can be like my friend Geoff, giving less fortunate people a fair go.

I hope that all of us, each in our own way, will strive to understand and help others.

I wish us all a Happy Australia Day.

Bill Clinton: 'But the birds of that land decided that if they worked together they could raise the sky', Remarks on the International Coral Reef Initiative - 1996

22 November 1996, Port Douglas, Queensland, Australia

Thank you very much. Premier and Mrs. Borbidge, Mayor Berwick, Minister Hill and Mrs. Hill, members of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, and to Minister Moore and Mrs. Moore, especially to Alicia Stevens for reminding us what this is all about today.

Hillary and I and our party have had a wonderful visit to Australia. We understand now why it is called the Lucky Country. But we believe that there is more than luck involved here. Today we celebrate the commitment of the people of this country, of the United States, and people all over the world to the proposition that we must preserve the natural resources that God has given us. We are here near the biggest, best managed protected marine and coastal area in the world for a clear reason: Australia has made a national commitment to be good stewards of the land with which God blessed you.

I am especially pleased today, as has already been said, that the Government of Australia is honoring the United States by naming a section of the Great Barrier Reef after Rachel Carson. Rachel Carson was the great American environmentalist; she was a marine biologist. Vice President Gore wrote about Rachel Carson: She brought us back to a fundamental idea lost to an amazing degree in modern civilization, the interconnection of human beings and the natural environment. That interconnection clearly imposes upon all of us a shared responsibility. To preserve a future for our children and grandchildren, we must care for our shared environment. It is a practical and a moral imperative.

We are citizens not only of individual nations but of this small and fragile planet. We know that pollution has contempt for borders, that what comes out of a smokestack in one nation can wind up on the shores of another an ocean away. We know, too, that recovery and preservation also benefits people beyond the borders of the nation in which it occurs. We know that protecting the environment can affect not only our health and our quality of life, it can even affect the peace. In too many places, including those about which we read too often now on the troubled continent of Africa, abuses like deforestation breed scarcity, and scarcity aggravates the turmoil which exists all over the world.

I am very proud of the work our two nations have done to preserve our natural heritage. Just as we have been allies for peace and freedom, we must be allies in the 21st century to protect the Earth's environment. Our work together on the International Coral Reef Initiative is a shining example of what we can achieve. Founded in 1994 by Australia, the United States, and six other governments, this initiative helps nations and regions to conserve, manage, and monitor coral reefs.

Pollution, overfishing, and overuse have put many of our unique reefs at risk. Their disappearance would destroy the habitat of countless species. It would unravel the web of marine life that holds the potential for new chemicals, new medicines, unlocking new mysteries. It would have a devastating effect on the coastal communities from Cairns to Key West, Florida, communities whose livelihood depends upon the reefs.

Steadily we are making progress. In this part of the world, the ICRI has played a crucial role in slowing the use of cyanide to harvest coral reef fish. Around the world, more than 75 nations and scores of organizations have participated in ICRI programs. Today, with your knowledge and leadership, we are seeing to it that the world's reefs make it into the next century safe and secure. And I thank you for that.

Let me say that our effort to save the world's reefs is a model for the work that we can do together in other environmental areas, and there is a lot of work to do. Deforestation is claiming an area the size of South Korea every year. Let us, together with the United Nations, develop a strategy for the sustainable management of all our forests.

Toxic chemicals and pesticides banned here and in the United States can still find their way into our lives, endangering our land, our water, and our children. Rachel Carson, whom we honor here today, helped alert us in the United States to these dangers. Let us now forge a global agreement to stop these toxic substances from being released into the world around us.

Today, thanks to the Montreal Protocol, we are slowing the production and the consumption of chlorofluorocarbons, the chemicals that have been eating a hole in the Earth's ozone layer. We're on our way to closing the ozone hole that threatens Antarctica and Australia. Now we must see to it that this landmark treaty is enforced from one corner of the Earth to another. We need no more new holes in the ozone.

Finally, we must work to reduce harmful greenhouse gas emissions. These gases released by cars and power plants and burning forests affect our health and our climate. They are literally warming our planet. If they continue unabated, the consequences will be nothing short of devastating for the children here in this audience and their children.

New weather patterns, lost species, the spread of infectious diseases, damaged economies, rising sea levels: if present trends continue, there is a real risk that sometime in the next century, parts of this very park we are here in today could disappear, submerged by a rising ocean. That is why today, from this remarkable place, I call upon the community of nations to agree to legally binding commitments to fight climate change.

We must stand together against the threat of global warming. A greenhouse may be a good place to raise plants; it is no place to nurture our children. And we can avoid dangerous global warming if we begin today and if we begin together.

If we meet all these challenges, we can make 1997 a milestone year in protecting the global environment. We can do it in a way that encourages sustainable development. One thing we've learned in recent years is that protecting the environment and promoting human progress are not incompatible goals; they go hand in hand. I am very pleased that the United Nations General Assembly will have a special session in New York next year to review our progress in advancing sustainable development since the Earth summit in Rio.

An Australian folktale has it that in the beginning the sky was so close to the Earth that it blocked out all the light. Everyone was forced to crawl in the darkness, collecting with their hands whatever they could find to eat. But the birds of that land decided that if they worked together they could raise the sky and make more room to move about. Slowly, with long sticks, they lifted the sky. The darkness passed, and everyone stood upright.

If we work together as those birds did, we can preserve our environment for our children, for their children, for generations beyond. Let us lift our sights and ourselves to that great challenge.

Thank you very much.

Stella Young: 'And these images, there are lots of them out there, they are what we call inspiration porn', TEDxSydney - 2014

April 2014 TEDxSydney, Australia

I grew up in a very small country town in Victoria. I had a very normal, low-key kind of upbringing. I went to school, I hung out with my friends, I fought with my younger sisters. It was all very normal. And when I was 15, a member of my local community approached my parents and wanted to nominate me for a community achievement award. And my parents said, "Hm, that's really nice, but there's kind of one glaring problem with that. She hasn't actually achieved anything." (Laughter)

And they were right, you know. I went to school, I got good marks, I had a very low-key after school job in my mum's hairdressing salon, and I spent a lot of time watching "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Dawson's Creek." Yeah, I know. What a contradiction. But they were right, you know. I wasn't doing anything that was out of the ordinary at all. I wasn't doing anything that could be considered an achievement if you took disability out of the equation. Years later, I was on my second teaching round in a Melbourne high school, and I was about 20 minutes into a year 11 legal studies class when this boy put up his hand and said, "Hey miss, when are you going to start doing your speech?" And I said, "What speech?" You know, I'd been talking them about defamation law for a good 20 minutes. And he said, "You know, like, your motivational speaking. You know, when people in wheelchairs come to school, they usually say, like, inspirational stuff?" (Laughter) "It's usually in the big hall."

 And that's when it dawned on me: This kid had only ever experienced disabled people as objects of inspiration. We are not, to this kid -- and it's not his fault, I mean, that's true for many of us. For lots of us, disabled people are not our teachers or our doctors or our manicurists. We're not real people. We are there to inspire. And in fact, I am sitting on this stage looking like I do in this wheelchair, and you are probably kind of expecting me to inspire you. Right? (Laughter) Yeah.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, I'm afraid I'm going to disappoint you dramatically. I am not here to inspire you. I am here to tell you that we have been lied to about disability. Yeah, we've been sold the lie that disability is a Bad Thing, capital B, capital T. It's a bad thing, and to live with a disability makes you exceptional. It's not a bad thing, and it doesn't make you exceptional.

 And in the past few years, we've been able to propagate this lie even further via social media. You may have seen images like this one: "The only disability in life is a bad attitude." Or this one: "Your excuse is invalid." Indeed. Or this one: "Before you quit, try!" These are just a couple of examples, but there are a lot of these images out there. You know, you might have seen the one, the little girl with no hands drawing a picture with a pencil held in her mouth. You might have seen a child running on carbon fiber prosthetic legs. And these images, there are lots of them out there, they are what we call inspiration porn. (Laughter) And I use the term porn deliberately, because they objectify one group of people for the benefit of another group of people. So in this case, we're objectifying disabled people for the benefit of nondisabled people. The purpose of these images is to inspire you, to motivate you, so that we can look at them and think, "Well, however bad my life is, it could be worse. I could be that person."

But what if you are that person? I've lost count of the number of times that I've been approached by strangers wanting to tell me that they think I'm brave or inspirational, and this was long before my work had any kind of public profile. They were just kind of congratulating me for managing to get up in the morning and remember my own name. (Laughter) And it is objectifying. These images, those images objectify disabled people for the benefit of nondisabled people. They are there so that you can look at them and think that things aren't so bad for you, to put your worries into perspective.

 And life as a disabled person is actually somewhat difficult. We do overcome some things. But the things that we're overcoming are not the things that you think they are. They are not things to do with our bodies. I use the term "disabled people" quite deliberately, because I subscribe to what's called the social model of disability, which tells us that we are more disabled by the society that we live in than by our bodies and our diagnoses.

So I have lived in this body a long time. I'm quite fond of it. It does the things that I need it to do, and I've learned to use it to the best of its capacity just as you have, and that's the thing about those kids in those pictures as well. They're not doing anything out of the ordinary. They are just using their bodies to the best of their capacity. So is it really fair to objectify them in the way that we do, to share those images? People, when they say, "You're an inspiration," they mean it as a compliment. And I know why it happens. It's because of the lie, it's because we've been sold this lie that disability makes you exceptional. And it honestly doesn't.

And I know what you're thinking. You know, I'm up here bagging out inspiration, and you're thinking, "Jeez, Stella, aren't you inspired sometimes by some things?" And the thing is, I am. I learn from other disabled people all the time. I'm learning not that I am luckier than them, though. I am learning that it's a genius idea to use a pair of barbecue tongs to pick up things that you dropped. (Laughter) I'm learning that nifty trick where you can charge your mobile phone battery from your chair battery. Genius. We are learning from each others' strength and endurance, not against our bodies and our diagnoses, but against a world that exceptionalizes and objectifies us.

I really think that this lie that we've been sold about disability is the greatest injustice. It makes life hard for us. And that quote, "The only disability in life is a bad attitude," the reason that that's bullshit is because it's just not true, because of the social model of disability. No amount of smiling at a flight of stairs has ever made it turn into a ramp. Never. (Laughter) (Applause) Smiling at a television screen isn't going to make closed captions appear for people who are deaf. No amount of standing in the middle of a bookshop and radiating a positive attitude is going to turn all those books into braille. It's just not going to happen.

I really want to live in a world where disability is not the exception, but the norm. I want to live in a world where a 15-year-old girl sitting in her bedroom watching "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" isn't referred to as achieving anything because she's doing it sitting down. I want to live in a world where we don't have such low expectations of disabled people that we are congratulated for getting out of bed and remembering our own names in the morning. I want to live in a world where we value genuine achievement for disabled people, and I want to live in a world where a kid in year 11 in a Melbourne high school is not one bit surprised that his new teacher is a wheelchair user.

Disability doesn't make you exceptional, but questioning what you think you know about it does.

Thank you.

(Applause)

Stephen Hawking: 'Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain inward-looking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space', Questioning the Universe, TED talk - 2008

February 2008,

This is a TED talk, one of the most popular ever, from TED2008

There is nothing bigger or older than the universe. The questions I would like to talk about are: one, where did we come from? How did the universe come into being? Are we alone in the universe? Is there alien life out there? What is the future of the human race?

Up until the 1920s, everyone thought the universe was essentially static and unchanging in time. Then it was discovered that the universe was expanding. Distant galaxies were moving away from us. This meant they must have been closer together in the past. If we extrapolate back, we find we must have all been on top of each other about 15 billion years ago. This was the Big Bang, the beginning of the universe.

But was there anything before the Big Bang? If not, what created the universe? Why did the universe emerge from the Big Bang the way it did? We used to think that the theory of the universe could be divided into two parts. First, there were the laws like Maxwell's equations and general relativity that determined the evolution of the universe, given its state over all of space at one time. And second, there was no question of the initial state of the universe.

We have made good progress on the first part, and now have the knowledge of the laws of evolution in all but the most extreme conditions. But until recently, we have had little idea about the initial conditions for the universe. However, this division into laws of evolution and initial conditions depends on time and space being separate and distinct. Under extreme conditions, general relativity and quantum theory allow time to behave like another dimension of space. This removes the distinction between time and space, and means the laws of evolution can also determine the initial state. The universe can spontaneously create itself out of nothing.

Moreover, we can calculate a probability that the universe was created in different states. These predictions are in excellent agreement with observations by the WMAP satellite of the cosmic microwave background, which is an imprint of the very early universe. We think we have solved the mystery of creation. Maybe we should patent the universe and charge everyone royalties for their existence.

I now turn to the second big question: are we alone, or is there other life in the universe? We believe that life arose spontaneously on the Earth, so it must be possible for life to appear on other suitable planets, of which there seem to be a large number in the galaxy.

But we don't know how life first appeared. We have two pieces of observational evidence on the probability of life appearing. The first is that we have fossils of algae from 3.5 billion years ago. The Earth was formed 4.6 billion years ago and was probably too hot for about the first half billion years. So life appeared on Earth within half a billion years of it being possible, which is short compared to the 10-billion-year lifetime of a planet of Earth type. This suggests that the probability of life appearing is reasonably high. If it was very low, one would have expected it to take most of the ten billion years available.

On the other hand, we don't seem to have been visited by aliens. I am discounting the reports of UFOs. Why would they appear only to cranks and weirdos? If there is a government conspiracy to suppress the reports and keep for itself the scientific knowledge the aliens bring, it seems to have been a singularly ineffective policy so far. Furthermore, despite an extensive search by the SETI project, we haven't heard any alien television quiz shows. This probably indicates that there are no alien civilizations at our stage of development within a radius of a few hundred light years. Issuing an insurance policy against abduction by aliens seems a pretty safe bet.

This brings me to the last of the big questions: the future of the human race. If we are the only intelligent beings in the galaxy, we should make sure we survive and continue. But we are entering an increasingly dangerous period of our history. Our population and our use of the finite resources of planet Earth are growing exponentially, along with our technical ability to change the environment for good or ill. But our genetic code still carries the selfish and aggressive instincts that were of survival advantage in the past. It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand or million.

Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain inward-looking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space. The answers to these big questions show that we have made remarkable progress in the last hundred years. But if we want to continue beyond the next hundred years, our future is in space. That is why I am in favor of manned -- or should I say, personned -- space flight.

All of my life I have sought to understand the universe and find answers to these questions. I have been very lucky that my disability has not been a serious handicap. Indeed, it has probably given me more time than most people to pursue the quest for knowledge. The ultimate goal is a complete theory of the universe, and we are making good progress. Thank you for listening.

Chris Anderson: Professor, if you had to guess either way, do you now believe that it is more likely than not that we are alone in the Milky Way, as a civilization of our level of intelligence or higher? This answer took seven minutes, and really gave me an insight into the incredible act of generosity this whole talk was for TED.

Stephen Hawking: I think it quite likely that we are the only civilization within several hundred light years; otherwise we would have heard radio waves. The alternative is that civilizations don't last very long, but destroy themselves.

CA: Professor Hawking, thank you for that answer. We will take it as a salutary warning, I think, for the rest of our conference this week. Professor, we really thank you for the extraordinary effort you made to share your questions with us today. Thank you very much indeed.

(Applause)TE

Malala Yousafzai: 'One child, one teacher, one pen and one book can change the world', UN Youth Assembly - 2013

12 July 2013, UN Youth Assembly, New York, USA

In the name of God, The Most Beneficent, The Most Merciful.

Honourable UN Secretary General Mr Ban Ki-moon,

Respected President General Assembly Vuk Jeremic

Honourable UN envoy for Global education Mr Gordon Brown,

Respected elders and my dear brothers and sisters;

Today, it is an honour for me to be speaking again after a long time. Being here with such honourable people is a great moment in my life.

I don't know where to begin my speech. I don't know what people would be expecting me to say. But first of all, thank you to God for whom we all are equal and thank you to every person who has prayed for my fast recovery and a new life. I cannot believe how much love people have shown me. I have received thousands of good wish cards and gifts from all over the world. Thank you to all of them. Thank you to the children whose innocent words encouraged me. Thank you to my elders whose prayers strengthened me.

I would like to thank my nurses, doctors and all of the staff of the hospitals in Pakistan and the UK and the UAE government who have helped me get better and recover my strength. I fully support Mr Ban Ki-moon the Secretary-General in his Global Education First Initiative and the work of the UN Special Envoy Mr Gordon Brown.  And I thank them both for the leadership they continue to give. They continue to inspire all of us to action.

Dear brothers and sisters, do remember one thing. Malala day is not my day. Today is the day of every woman, every boy and every girl who have raised their voice for their rights. There are hundreds of Human rights activists and social workers who are not only speaking for human rights, but who are struggling to achieve their goals of education, peace and equality. Thousands of people have been killed by the terrorists and millions have been injured. I am just one of them.

So here I stand...    one girl among many.

I speak – not for myself, but for all girls and boys.

I raise up my voice – not so that I can shout, but so that those without a voice can be heard.

Those who have fought for their rights:

Their right to live in peace.

Their right to be treated with dignity.

Their right to equality of opportunity.

Their right to be educated.

Dear Friends, on the 9th of October 2012, the Taliban shot me on the left side of my forehead. They shot my friends too. They thought that the bullets would silence us. But they failed. And then, out of that silence came, thousands of voices. The terrorists thought that they would change our aims and stop our ambitions but nothing changed in my life except this: Weakness, fear and hopelessness died. Strength, power and courage was born.  I am the same Malala. My ambitions are the same. My hopes are the same. My dreams are the same.

Dear sisters and brothers, I am not against anyone. Neither am I here to speak in terms of personal revenge against the Taliban or any other terrorists group. I am here to speak up for the right of education of every child. I want education for the sons and the daughters of all the extremists especially the Taliban.

I do not even hate the Talib who shot me. Even if there is a gun in my hand and he stands in front of me. I would not shoot him. This is the compassion that I have learnt from Muhammad-the prophet of mercy, Jesus christ and Lord Buddha. This is the legacy of change that I have inherited from Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and Muhammad Ali Jinnah. This is the philosophy of non-violence that I have learnt from Gandhi Jee, Bacha Khan and Mother Teresa. And this is the forgiveness that I have learnt from my mother and father. This is what my soul is telling me, be peaceful and love everyone.

Dear sisters and brothers, we realise the importance of light when we see darkness. We realise the importance of our voice when we are silenced. In the same way, when we were in Swat, the north of Pakistan, we realised the importance of pens and books when we saw the guns.

The wise saying, “The pen is mightier than sword” was true. The extremists are afraid of books and pens. The power of education frightens them. They are afraid of women. The power of the voice of women frightens them. And that is why they killed 14 innocent medical students in the recent attack in Quetta. And that is why they killed many female teachers and polio workers in Khyber Pukhtoon Khwa and FATA. That is why they are blasting schools every day.  Because they were and they are afraid of change, afraid of the equality that we will bring into our society.

I remember that there was a boy in our school who was asked by a journalist, “Why are the Taliban against education?” He answered very simply. By pointing to his book he said, “A Talib doesn't know what is written inside this book.” They think that God is a tiny, little conservative being who would send girls to the hell just because of going to school. The terrorists are misusing the name of Islam and Pashtun society for their own personal benefits. Pakistan is peace-loving democratic country. Pashtuns want education for their daughters and sons. And Islam is a religion of peace, humanity and brotherhood. Islam says that it is not only each child's right to get education, rather it is their duty and responsibility.

Honourable Secretary General, peace is necessary for education. In many parts of the world especially Pakistan and Afghanistan; terrorism, wars and conflicts stop children to go to their schools. We are really tired of these wars. Women and children are suffering in many parts of the world in many ways. In India, innocent and poor children are victims of child labour. Many schools have been destroyed in Nigeria. People in Afghanistan have been affected by the hurdles of extremism for decades. Young girls have to do domestic child labour and are forced to get married at early age. Poverty, ignorance, injustice, racism and the deprivation of basic rights are the main problems faced by both men and women.

Dear fellows, today I am focusing on women's rights and girls' education because they are suffering the most. There was a time when women social activists asked men to stand up for their rights. But, this time, we will do it by ourselves. I am not telling men to step away from speaking for women's rights rather I am focusing on women to be independent to fight for themselves.

Dear sisters and brothers, now it's time to speak up.

So today, we call upon the world leaders to change their strategic policies in favour of peace and prosperity.

We call upon the world leaders that all the peace deals must protect women and children's rights. A deal that goes against the dignity of women and their rights is unacceptable.

We call upon all governments to ensure free compulsory education for every child all over the world.

We call upon all governments to fight against terrorism and violence, to protect children from brutality and harm.

We call upon the developed nations to support the expansion of educational opportunities for girls in the developing world.

We call upon all communities to be tolerant – to reject prejudice based on cast, creed, sect, religion or gender. To ensure freedom and equality for women so that they can flourish. We cannot all succeed when half of us are held back.

We call upon our sisters around the world to be brave – to embrace the strength within themselves and realise their full potential.

Dear brothers and sisters, we want schools and education for every child's bright future. We will continue our journey to our destination of peace and education for everyone. No one can stop us. We will speak for our rights and we will bring change through our voice. We must believe in the power and the strength of our words. Our words can change the world.

Because we are all together, united for the cause of education. And if we want to achieve our goal, then let us empower ourselves with the weapon of knowledge and let us shield ourselves with unity and togetherness.

Dear brothers and sisters, we must not forget that millions of people are suffering from poverty, injustice and ignorance. We must not forget that millions of children are out of schools. We must not forget that our sisters and brothers are waiting for a bright peaceful future.

So let us wage a global struggle against illiteracy, poverty and terrorism and let us pick up our books and pens. They are our most powerful weapons.

One child, one teacher, one pen and one book can change the world. 

Education is the only solution. Education First.

Angelina Jolie: 'I am here today to say that refugees are not numbers', World Refugee Day - 2009

18 June 2009, Washington DC, USA

We're here today to talk about millions of desperate families – families so cut-off from civilization that they don't even know that a day like this exists on their behalf. Millions. And numbers can illuminate but they can also obscure. So I am here today to say that refugees are not numbers. They’re not even just refugees. They are mothers and daughters and fathers and sons – they are farmers, teachers, doctors, engineers, they are individuals all. And most of all they are survivors – each one with a remarkable story that tells of resilience in the face of great loss. They are the most impressive people I have ever met and they are also some of the world's most vulnerable. Stripped of home and country, refugees are buffeted from every ill wind that blows across this planet.

I remember meeting a pregnant Afghani woman in a completely abandoned camp in Pakistan. She couldn't travel when everyone else was relocated because she was too late in her pregnancy. She was alone with her two children and another woman. There was nothing for miles around the camp – not a single tree, no other people in sight. So when they asked me to come in for tea I said I didn't feel it necessary. But being Afghans, they take pride in how they treat their guests so they insisted and they guided me into a small dirt house with no roof to keep out the scorching heat, and they dusted off the two old mats that they ate, slept and prayed on. And we sat and we talked and they were just the loveliest women. And then with a few twigs and a single tin cup of water, they made the last of their tea and insisted on me to enjoy it.

Since before the parable of the Widow’s Mite it has been known that those who have the least will give the most. Most refugee families will offer you the only food they have and pretend they're not hungry. And the generosity of the poor applies not only to refugees. We should never forget that more than 80% of refugees are hosted and have been for years and years in the poorest developing countries.

Pakistan, a country now facing a crisis with over two million of its own people despised is still hosting 1.7 million Afghans and has hosted millions of Afghan families for nearly thirty years. I remember before we said good-bye to the pregnant lady she pointed to a young boy. He had a dusty face, the brightest green eyes I have ever seen but such a sad look but she explained that he's always asking for more food. And it hurts her to say that they have nothing. And she asked if we would consider taking him, would we take her sons so he could eat. And she said it with tears in her eyes with such a desperation. A desperation unimaginable to every parent in this room. A few weeks later, a war in Afghanistan began and heavy fighting started right where they were. I've been back to that region three times and I look for them every time.

The threat of climate change, the competition for resources, and ever growing global inequality has created deepening intractable conflicts. Whether it be Darfur, Myanmar, or Swat Valley or some as yet unknown crisis. Mass migrations will be a feature of our future, and we must adjust to this living reality. And again I would urge you to look beyond the simple number and look instead at the individual.

I remember in Tanzania, I met a child in a tent. He sat on the dusty floor; he's been shot on the back and left paralyzed. And he crawled forward to shake my hand, he was no more than fifteen. He had bog pretty eyes, big wide sparkling smile, and after he'd been to, he's full of laughter and love. Later that night I asked whether he'd not been taken to a hospital or at least given a wheelchair and I was told that the boy's entire family had been killed so there was no one to look after him. And he'd not been accepted for asylum in a third. And the aid worker said they’d spent the money they could but they didn't have any more. And I thought about him all night and I wondered what I should do. And then I remembered the next thing I walked through the camp and I saw more victims of war. I saw small children full of hunger and fear, crying mothers, wounded fathers, I saw a sea of humanity - all desperate, all deserving.

There are hundreds of thousands in that camp and there are millions around the world. And at that time I felt hopeless and overwhelmed by the realization of the magnitude of the problem. But the later on that trip, I met an eight year old girl who had seen her family killed in front of her and she grabbed her baby brother and she ran into the jungle and survived, terrified an alone for two weeks. She managed to find bananas and feed herself and her brother. And when I met her she didn’t talk, she just walked back and forth and I kept trying to tell her how brave we thought she was. She just stared at the window. And a year later I came back to that same camp and i saw her again. She was still very shy but she was beginning to speak and she was sweet and polite but she still didn't care about [] me or visitors she just wanted to know how her brother was. He was with the doctors and she was just checking to make sure everything's gonna be okay. She was his mother now. That little girl had a depth and a strength that I will never know. And on that trip, and many that followed I came to know refugees as not only as the most vulnerable people on earth but as the most resilient.

As an American I know the strength that diversity has given my country. A country built by what now some would dismiss as asylum seekers or economic migrants. And I believe we must persuade the world that refugees must now be simply viewed as a burden. They are survivors. And they can bring those qualities to the service of their communities and the countries that shelter them.

If you see the individual, you see the education and knowledge the refugees pass on to their children because often it is all they have to pass on. It is why it's so important that we give them education. If you see the individual, you see the contribution that can be made by refugees to their host countries and how important they will be to their own land when eventually they return.

In the last nine years I have made many visits to the field with UNFCR. I do it to raise awareness for the plight of refugees but I also do it for me. The refugees I have met and spent time with have profoundly changed my life. The eight-year-old girl who saved her brother taught me what it is to be brave. The pregnant woman in Pakistan taught me what it is to be a mother. And the paralyzed boy who had been shot in the back with his big smile showed me the strength of an unbreakable spirit. So today, on world refugee day, I thank them for letting me into their lives. And I thank you for coming.

Related content: Angelina Jolie's speech in Turkey for World Refugee Day 2015, is also on Speakola.

"We are here for a simple reason: This region is at the epicentre of a global crisis. Nearly 60 million people are displaced from their homes. That is one in every 122 people on our planet."

Full transcript and video

Dan Savage: 'No two people are perfect for each other, ever, period', The Price of Admission - 2010

Location & date of speech unknown, uploaded Yotuube 2011

Reading question card: Waht is wrong with me, I find a flaw and can't get over it. For example if a guy chews with his mouth open, I could never see him again.

You are the problem with you. If you have a list of deal breakers that has more than five things on it, you need ot wait around to get a sex robot -- that you can program to be perfect for you in every possible way.

People., there is no settling down without some settling for. There is no long-term relationship not just putting up with your partner’s flaws, but accepting them and then pretending they aren’t there. We like to call it in my house “paying the price of admission.” ... I have certain flaws that I shall not tick off here, and my boyfriend has certain flaws that I shall be. And we've been together fourteen years, actually thirteen but we're like a hotel, where we're skipping the thirteenth floor, because it's bad luck. His flaws used to drive me fucking crazy. He also wasn't what I thought I wanted -- he's seven years younger, and didn't go to college, and he's an artist, and you know I'm a dumb writer, and I thought I needed soembody whose a doctor, or a lawyer, a stable career becasue I'm an idiot. And he wasn't what I was looking for and you know we fell in love and we're still together. If I wasw like 'you won't do, you won't do', if I didn't give him a chance, I would have cheated myself out of the love of my life.

Your boyfriend who chews with his mouth open, you can say, 'Chew with your fucking mouth shut,' and hopefully he'll get there. But if he never does, him chewing with his mouth open might be the price of admission. ...it might be the price you need to pay to ride that ride.

We used to make the dumb mistakes and these things I think play out more toxically in those mixed gender relationships you heterosexuals get into, that never work out. Because they're fraught with women's studies courses and female opression and centuries of female oppression -- he doesn't put anything away, he makes a sandwich and then there's the mayonnaise jar sitting there on the counter, there's the bread, there's the milk that he left out, there's the mustard, there's the meat, all of it left out. In August. We're all going to die of tomaine poisoning. I used to follow him around and yell 'put that fucking shit away!', and then one day, I put it away. And it took a tenth of the time that yelling at him about itsould have taken, and I went, oh, right, this is one of the prices of admission. 

I love him so much, it's worth it. Just to put the fucking mayonnaise away myself.

And you can’t have a long-term relationship with someone unless you’re willing to identify the prices of admission you’re willing to pay — and the ones you’re not. But the ones you’re not — the list of things you’re not willing to put up with — you really have to be able to count [them] on one hand…

And it can't be superficial bullshit like 'chews with his mouth open'. It really can't, as disgusting as that is.

Because you'll never be in a relationship with anyine. You're going to be Jerry Seinfeld, but without the millions in residuals ... constantly rejecting women because she has 'man hands' - all this bullshit, right.

People, when they’re young, have this idea… “There’s someone out there who’s perfect for me There's the one.”

“The one” does not fucking exist.

“The one” is a lie. But the beautiful part of the lie is that it’s a lie you can tell yourself.

Any long-term relationship that’s successful is really a myth that two people create together … and myths are built of lies, and there’s usually some kernel of truth…

My boyfriend and I have a long term relationship built on a solid foundation of lies and deceit.

When you think about it, you meet somebody for the first time, and they’re not presenting their warts-and-all self to you — they’re presenting their idealised self to you, they’re leading with their best.

And then, eventually, you’re farting in front of each other. Eventually, you get to see the person who is behind that facade of their best, and they get to see the person behind your facade, your lie-self — this lie that you presented to them about who you really are.

And what’s beautiful about a long-term relationship, and what can be transformative about it, is that I pretend every day that my boyfriend is the lie that I met when I first met him. And he does that same favor to me — he pretends that I’m that better person than I actually am.

Even though he knows I’m not. Even though I know he’s not.

And we then are obligated to live up to the lies we told each other about who we are — we are then forced to be better people than we actually are, because it’s expected of us by each other.

And you can, in a long-term relationship, really make your lie-self come true — if you’re smart, and you demand it of them, and you’re willing to give it to them. You have to be willing not to see him chewing with his mouth open, if you want to be around for his better qualities. And then buy into the lie-version where he never does that. Right? And they will hopefully do the same for you.

That’s the only way you become “the one” — it’s because somebody is willing to pretend you are. “The one” that they were waiting for, “the one” they wanted, their “one.” Because you’re not — nobody is. No two people are perfect for each other, ever, period — No two people are 100% sexually compatible, no two people are 100% emotionally compatible, no two people want the same things. And if you can’t reconcile yourself to that, you will have no relationships that last longer than two months.

And you know what? It’s not going to be their fault — it’s going to be your fault.

James Baldwin: 'I picked the cotton and I carried it to market and I built the railroads under someone else’s whip', debate v William F Buckley - 1965

1965, Cambridge University, United Kingdom

This debate was between arch conservative William F Buckley, the editor of the National Review, and James Baldwin, an African American playright, essayist and poet. The topic was, 'That the American dream has come at the expnse of the American Negro'. Baldwin gave this famous speech.

Good evening,

I find myself, not for the first time, in the position of a kind of Jeremiah. For example, I don’t disagree with Mr. Burford that the inequality suffered by the American Negro population of the United States has hindered the American dream. Indeed, it has. I quarrell with some other things he has to say. The other, deeper, element of a certain awkwardness I feel has to do with one’s point of view. I have to put it that way – one’s sense, one’s system of reality. It would seem to me the proposition before the House, and I would put it that way, is the American Dream at the expense of the American Negro, or the American Dream *is* at the expense of the American Negro. Is the question hideously loaded, and then one’s response to that question – one’s reaction to that question – has to depend on effect and, in effect, where you find yourself in the world, what your sense of reality is, what your system of reality is. That is, it depends on assumptions which we hold so deeply so as to be scarcely aware of them.

Are white South African or Mississippi sharecropper, or Mississippi sheriff, or a Frenchman driven out of Algeria, all have, at bottom, a system of reality which compels them to, for example, in the case of the French exile from Algeria, to offend French reasons from having ruled Algeria. The Mississippi or Alabama sheriff, who really does believe, when he’s facing a Negro boy or girl, that this woman, this man, this child must be insane to attack the system to which he owes his entire identity. Of course, to such a person, the proposition which we are trying to discuss here tonight does not exist. And on the other hand, I, have to speak as one of the people who’ve been most attacked by what we now must here call the Western or European system of reality. What white people in the world, what we call white supremacy – I hate to say it here – comes from Europe. It’s how it got to America. Beneath then, whatever one’s reaction to this proposition is, has to be the question of whether or not civilizations can be considered, as such, equal, or whether one’s civilization has the right to overtake and subjugate, and, in fact, to destroy another. Now, what happens when that happens. Leaving aside all the physical facts that one can quote. Leaving aside, rape or murder. Leaving aside the bloody catalog of oppression, which we are in one way too familiar with already, what this does to the subjugated, the most private, the most serious thing this does to the subjugated, is to destroy his sense of reality. It destroys, for example, his father’s authority over him. His father can no longer tell him anything, because the past has disappeared, and his father has no power in the world. This means, in the case of an American Negro, born in that glittering republic, and the moment you are born, since you don’t know any better, every stick and stone and every face is white.

And since you have not yet seen a mirror, you suppose that you are, too. It comes as a great shock around the age of 5, or 6, or 7, to discover that the flag to which you have pledged allegiance, along with everybody else, has not pledged allegiance to you. It comes as a great shock to discover that Gary Cooper killing off the Indians, when you were rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians were you. It comes as a great shock to discover that the country which is your birthplace and to which you owe your life and your identity, has not, in its whole system of reality, evovled any place for you. The disaffection, the demoralization, and the gap between one person and another only on the basis of the color of their skin, begins there and accelerates – accelerates throughout a whole lifetime – to the present when you realize you’re thirty and are having a terrible time managing to trust your countrymen. By the time you are thirty, you have been through a certain kind of mill. And the most serious effect of the mill you’ve been through is, again, not the catalog of disaster, the policemen, the taxi drivers, the waiters, the landlady, the landlord, the banks, the insurance companies, the millions of details, twenty four hours of every day, which spell out to you that you are a worthless human being. It is not that. It’s by that time that you’ve begun to see it happening, in your daughter or your son, or your niece or your nephew.

You are thirty by now and nothing you have done has helped to escape the trap. But what is worse than that, is that nothing you have done, and as far as you can tell, nothing you can do, will save your son or your daughter from meeting the same disaster and not impossibly coming to the same end. Now, we’re speaking about expense. I suppose there are several ways to address oneself, to some attempt to find what that word means here. Let me put it this way, that from a very literal point of view, the harbors and the ports, and the railroads of the country–the economy, especially of the Southern states–could not conceivably be what it has become, if they had not had, and do not still have, indeed for so long, for many generations, cheap labor. I am stating very seriously, and this is not an overstatement: *I* picked the cotton, *I* carried it to the market, and *I* built the railroads under someone else’s whip for nothing. For nothing.

The Southern oligarchy, which has still today so very much power in Washington, and therefore some power in the world, was created by my labor and my sweat, and the violation of my women and the murder of my children. This, in the land of the free, and the home of the brave.And no one can challenge that statement. It is a matter of historical record.

In another way, this dream, and we’ll get to the dream in a moment, is at the expense of the American Negro. You watched this in the Deep South in great relief. But not only in the Deep South. In the Deep South, you are dealing with a sheriff or a landlord, or a landlady or a girl of the Western Union desk, and she doesn’t know quite who she’s dealing with, by which I mean, that if you’re not a part of the town, and if you are a Nothern Nigger, it shows in millions of ways. So she simply knows that it’s an unknown quantity, and she wants to have nothing to do with it because she won’t talk to you, you have to wait for a while to get your telegram. OK, we all know this. We’ve all been through it and, by the time you get to be a man, it’s very easy to deal with. But what is happening in the poor woman, the poor man’s mind is this: they’ve been raised to believe, and by now they helplessly believe, that no matter how terrible their lives may be, and their lives have been quite terrible, and no matter how far they fall, no matter what disaster overtakes them, they have one enormous knowledge in consolation, which is like a heavenly revelation: at least, they are not Black.

Now, I suggest that of all the terrible things that can happen to a human being, that is one of the worst. I suggest that what has happened to white Southerners is in some ways, after all, much worse than what has happened to Negroes there because Sheriff Clark in Selma, Alabama, cannot be considered – you know, no one can be dismissed as a total monster. I’m sure he loves his wife, his children. I’m sure, you know, he likes to get drunk. You know, after all, one’s got to assume he is visibly a man like me. But he doesn’t know what drives him to use the club, to menace with the gun and to use the cattle prod. Something awful must have happened to a human being to be able to put a cattle prod against a woman’s breasts, for example. What happens to the woman is ghastly. What happens to the man who does it is in some ways much, much worse. This is being done, after all, not a hundred years ago, but in 1965, in a country which is blessed with what we call prosperity, a word we won’t examine too closely; with a certain kind of social coherence, which calls itself a civilized nation, and which espouses the notion of the freedom of the world. And it is perfectly true from the point of view now simply of an American Negro. Any American Negro watching this, no matter where he is, from the vantage point of Harlem, which is another terrible place, has to say to himself, in spite of what the government says – the government says we can’t do anything about it – but if those were white people being murdered in Mississippi work farms, being carried off to jail, if those were white children running up and down the streets, the government would find some way of doing something about it. We have a civil rights bill now where an amendment, the fifteenth amendment, nearly a hundred years ago – I hate to sound again like an Old Testament prophet – but if the amendment was not honored then, I would have any reason to believe in the civil rights bill will be honored now. And after all one’s been there, since before, you know, a lot of other people got there. If one has got to prove one’s title to the land, isn’t four hundred years enough? Four hundred years? At least three wars? The American soil is full of the corpses of my ancestors. Why is my freedom or my citizenship, or my right to live there, how is it conceivably a question now? And I suggest further, and in the same way, the moral life of Alabama sheriffs and poor Alabama ladies – white ladies – their moral lives have been destroyed by the plague called color, that the American sense of reality has been corrupted by it.

At the risk of sounding excessive, what I always felt, when I finally left the country, and found myself abroad, in other places, and watched the Americans abroad – and these are my countrymen – and I do care about them, and even if I didn’t, there is something between us. We have the same shorthand, I know, if I look at a boy or a girl from Tennessee, where they came from in Tennessee and what that means. No Englishman knows that. No Frenchman, no one in the world knows that, except another Black man who comes from the same place. One watches these lonely people denying the only kin they have. We talk about integration in America as though it was some great new conundrum. The problem in America is that we’ve been integrated for a very long time. Put me next to any African and you will see what I mean. My grandmother was not a rapist. What we are not facing is the result of what we’ve done. What one brings the American people to do for all our sakes is simply to accept our history. I was there not only as a slave, but also as a concubine. One knows the power, after all, which can be used against another person if you’ve got absolute power over that person.

It seemed to me when I watched Americans in Europe what they didn’t know about Europeans was what they didn’t know about me. They weren’t trying, for example, to be nasty to the French girl, or rude to the French waiter. They didn’t know they hurt their feelings. They didn’t have any sense this particular woman, this particular man, though they spoke another language and had different manners and ways, was a human being. And they walked over them, the same kind of bland ignorance, condescension, charming and cheerful with which they’ve always pat me on the head and called me Shine and were upset when I was upset. What is relevant about this is that whereas forty years ago when I was born, the question of having to deal with what is unspoken by the subjugated, what is never said to the master, of ever having to deal with this reality was a very remote possibility. It was in no one’s mind. When I was growing up, I was taught in American history books, that Africa had no history, and neither did I. That I was a savage about whom the less said, the better, who had been saved by Europe and brought to America. And, of course, I believed it. I didn’t have much choice. Those were the only books there were. Everyone else seemed to agree.

If you walk out of Harlem, ride out of Harlem, downtown, the world agrees what you see is much bigger, cleaner, whiter, richer, safer than where you are. They collect the garbage. People obviously can pay their life insurance. Their children look happy, safe. You’re not. And you go back home, and it would seem that, of course, that it’s an act of God that this is true! That you belong where white people have put you.

It is only since the Second World War that there’s been a counter-image in the world. And that image did not come about through any legislation or part of any American government, but through the fact that Africa was suddenly on the stage of the world, and Africans had to be dealt with in a way they’d never been dealt with before. This gave an American Negro for the first time a sense of himself beyond the savage or a clown. It has created and will create a great many conundrums. One of the great things that the white world does not know, but I think I do know, is that Black people are just like everybody else. One has used the myth of Negro and the myth of color to pretend and to assume that you were dealing with, essentially, with something exotic, bizarre, and practically, according to human laws, unknown. Alas, it is not true. We’re also mercenaries, dictators, murderers, liars. We are human too.

What is crucial here is that unless we can manage to accept, establish some kind of dialog between those people whom I pretend have paid for the American dream and those other people who have not achieved it, we will be in terrible trouble. I want to say, at the end, the last, is that is that is what concerns me most. We are sitting in this room, and we are all, at least I’d like to think we are, relatively civilized, and we can talk to each other at least on certain levels so that we could walk out of here assuming that the measure of our enlightenment, or at least, our politeness, has some effect on the world. It may not.

I remember, for example, when the ex Attorney General, Mr. Robert Kennedy, said that it was conceivable that in forty years, in America, we might have a Negro president. That sounded like a very emancipated statement, I suppose, to white people. They were not in Harlem when this statement was first heard. And they’re not here, and possibly will never hear the laughter and the bitterness, and the scorn with which this statement was greeted. From the point of view of the man in the Harlem barber shop, Bobby Kennedy only got here yesterday, and he’s already on his way to the presidency. We’ve been here for four hundred years and now he tells us that maybe in forty years, if you’re good, we may let you become president.

What is dangerous here is the turning away from – the turning away  from – anything any white American says. The reason for the political hesitation, in spite of the Johnson landslide is that one has been betrayed by American politicians for so long. And I am a grown man and perhaps I can be reasoned with. I certainly hope I can be. But I don’t know, and neither does Martin Luther King, none of us know how to deal with those other people whom the white world has so long ignored, who don’t believe anything the white world says and don’t entirely believe anything I or Martin is saying. And one can’t blame them. You watch what has happened to them in less than twenty years.

It seems to me that the City of New York, for example – this is my last point – It’s had Negroes in it for a very long time. If the city of New York were able, as it has indeed been able, in the last fifteen years to reconstruct itself, tear down buildings and raise great new ones, downtown and for money, and has done nothing whatever except build housing projects in the ghetto for the Negroes. And of course, Negroes hate it. Presently the property does indeed deteriorate because the children cannot bear it. They want to get out of the ghetto. If the American pretensions were based on more solid, a more honest assessment of life and of themselves, it would not mean for Negroes when someone says “Urban Renewal” that Negroes can simply are going to be thrown out into the streets. This is just what it does mean now. This is not an act of God. We’re dealing with a society made and ruled by men. Had the American Negro had not been present in America, I am convinced the history of the American labor movement would be much more edifying than it is. It is a terrible thing for an entire people to surrender to the notion that one-ninth of its population is beneath them. And until that moment, until the moment comes when we, the Americans, we, the American people, are able to accept the fact, that I have to accept, for example, that my ancestors are both white and Black. That on that continent we are trying to forge a new identity for which we need each other and that I am not a ward of America. I am not an object of missionary charity. I am one of the people who built the country–until this moment there is scarcely any hope for the American dream, because the people who are denied participation in it, by their very presence, will wreck it. And if that happens it is a very grave moment for the West.

Thank you.

Here is the full debate.

There’s a snippet of James Baldwin’s speech to introduce the Stan Grant ‘racism and the Australian Dream’ episode of the podcast. Listen below.

Al Gore: 'After the last no comes a yes, and on that yes the future world depends' COP 21, Paris Climate Conference - 2015

Video by Envirobeat

8 December 2015, COP 21 Conference, Paris, France

Last year was the first time in world history that CO2 levels did not go up when there was not a major recession or an event like the break up of the former Soviet Union.

This year it is too early to confirm this statistic but you have all seen the news stories that have come out yesterday. CO2 levels went down this year.

If that is confirmed we will look back on last year and this year as the time when we did reach the turning point. We are winning this. We must win it faster.  We must accelerate the pace.

A lot of damage has already been done.

More damage will occur because of the global warming pollution that is already in the atmosphere.

So we must speed up.

The march that took place on November 29th, of course there was due to be in one Paris and I myself understand completely the thinking of the French authorities, as I said at the beginning, we understand what they have gone through.

But I don’t want anyone here in Paris who didn’t see a march here, not to miss the fact that in cities all over hte world, there were mass marches to save the climate.

So the NGO community, the civil society and activists worldwide have done a fantastic job in mobilising people to demand action.

This was in Melbourne, November 27th, just before, the climate, there were marches all over the place. And it’s not just on the eve of the conference. Quebec City, Quebec is just a hero in my opinion, god bless Canada for all it has done here. This was a great march in April in Quebec.

Of course one year ago, on the eve of the special session of the United Nations, as amny as four hundred thousand people filled the streets of Manhattan.

And you may have heard how many of the leaders who spoke here on Monday, refer to the marches in the street.

So the best chance to address this climate crisis is here.

Now.

We have a few days left.

Whatever delegation you are following or are a part of, use these next 72 hours to double down on your commitment to DO THE RIGHT THING.

There are people who have been to previous conferences, and they look back on the long string of them, and they’re tempted to conclude, it’s not going to make any difference.

There was a poet in the United States in the last century called Wallace Stevens, who wrote the following line:

‘After the last no, comes a yes’

And on that yes the future world depends.

Every great moral cause that humanity has been faced with has met with a series of nos, addend fierce resistance. The abolition movement, the struggle for women’s suffrage and gender equity, which is ongoing, the civil rights movement, the struggle against apartheid, the struggle for the end of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation – all of these moral causes have met nos and fierce opposition.

But they all eventually came down to a single choice between one of two options: what is right, and what is wrong.

In this case, what is right is to save the future of our planet, and to say to future generations that we’ve done the right thing here.

Make no mistake, the next generation will inherit the Earth we bequeath to them, and depending upon their circumstances, they will ask one of two questions.

If they live in a world in which we have not addressed this crisis. In which we have not taken advantage of the opportunities to create jobs with renewables, and sustainable agriculture and fishing and forestries, and more efficiency.

If they suffer even worse floods and mudslides and droughts and the spreading of diseases into regions where they were unknown previously –the melting of the ice and the sea level rise, and the flows of millions of climate refugees – if they live in such a world, they would be justified in looking back at us, this group of us gathered here in Paris in December of 2015 and asking, ‘what were you thinking?! Why did you not act?!

But if they live in a world where there is a renewal of hope, where there are millions of jobs being created, where the carbon concentrations and greenhouse gas concentrations are declining, and where people are living and flourishing in communities with renewable systems and sustainable economies and if they look at their own children and feel secure in saying to them, ‘your world is going to be even better’, I want them to look back at us here, in this place, in this hour, on this day, and ask, ‘how did you find the moral courage? To break through the impasses  To rise above the differences. To see beyond the difficulties, across them to the bright future that was possible? And see the larger moral question that was at stake.

How did you do it? And part of the answer, will be that the men and women who came here to Paris from 195 countries around the world came together in support of a higher purpose.

To protect our home.

To protect our planet Earth.

We will say to them in answer, ‘we found out that political will was itself a renewable resource’.

Thank you very much, merci beaucoup.

Isra Mohammed: 'My name is Isra Mohammed, I am a Muslim and I am not a terrorist', Kenton School assembly - 2015

16 December 2015, Kenton School, Newcastle, UK

I want you to have a look at the picture behind me. What are your thoughts? Keep those thoughts in mind. Hopefully by the end, you'll alter them, or change them.

So if you all don't know, I am Muslim and I am proud.

But after the events that took place in Paris France on November 13th, there is a lot of negativity in the media about Islam.

So in google if you type in Muslim + Islam or Muslim + woman, these are some negative pictures that come up.

People think that Muslim women or Muslim girls have no rights, or have no freedom. But we do. Look at me for example. I'm Muslim. I'm a girl. But I don't wear a headscarf. I have the right and freedom to wear one, my Mum wants me to wear it, but she's given me the right and freedom of [ ] I feel comfortable enough.

So what is Islam and what do we actually believe in?

Islam is a beautiful religion, just like many others. It is a religion of peace and mercy. As a woman, I used the word [aslama malikem] every day of my life. It's a wish for the other person to blessed with peace. This is what it means to be Muslim.

In Islam, we live by the five pillars.

The first one, is that there should be one god.

The second one the ommitment to prayer

the third one, fasting in Ramadan,

The fourth one, charity and giving back,

The pilgrim to Mecca, which you must do at least once in your lifetime

In this picture, the small dots are actually people. They are all Muslim. They are there worshipping god. This is what Islam is actually about. Coming together as one.

In Islam, even a smile is charity.

But what is happening today. These are some negative headlines that come up online, and this is the latest one that came up this week. I want you to know that these headlines are actually false. None of them are actually true. And this upsets us becasue the people behind them are usually ISIS.

if you don't whoISIS is, it's a terrorist organisation, that cause nothing but harm and terror to the world, just like what happened in France. 129 lives were lost.

But Isis have one goal. They want countries like ours to reject Muslims. They'll be happy and ecstatic to hear, that since the events that took place in Paris, France, Muslims have already been threatened and attacked in the UK, America, Australia and all around the world.

This evil organisation have in their minds -- if they can get Muslims [to appear as] the enemy of the west, then Muslims in France, the UK, America and Australia will have nowhere to turn but to Isis.

So if you are someone with a Facebook account, a Twitter account, an Instagram account, or any form of social media, which I'm sure everyone here has, and you are throwing out masses of hate, you are helping Isis. You are supporting ISIS. This is what they want.

So think about it - do you want to be the person helping a terrorist organisation?

People think ISIS only kills non Muslims. But they don't. They also kill Muslims. Most of ISIS's victims are Muslims, like what's happening in Syria right now.

Therefore ISIS is Muslim and is not the face of Islam. In Islam we believe, whoever kills an innocent person, it is as if they've killed all of humanity. That's why all Muslims stand together against Islam.

'Therefore terrorism has no religion and terrorism is not the face of Islam

I have people coming to me at school, this week, and last week telling me that because I am a Muslim, I am a terrorist. And this is something I go through every day of my life. And it's become worse since what happened in France.

But how is this affecting Muslims around the world?

If you haven't heard, on November 15th, a man pushed a Muslim woman into an oncoming underground train, in London. Why? Because she was wearing a headscarf and she was a Muslim.

Imagine being that woman, and having to wake up every day and walk out your door, knowing you'll be attacked and threatened for doing what you believe.

People also have this idea that refugees and immigrants are stealing their jobs.

But they are not.

Take my dad as an example. He is a doctor. And he is Muslim. And he is successful. He saves lives every day. He could have saved one of your relatives.

People always think - that refugees from Syria, I've seen this on facebook, 'oh close the borders, they are ISIS, they are coming to destroy our country. '

As a matter of fact, ISIS took over their country, ISIS killed their loved ones. ISIS destroyed their homes.

So how would you feel if I was you? Sitting at home, bombs going off, people dying.

There's children, who are coming to the UK, with no families.

So how would you feel, if I was you, in my situation? 

I have a seven-year-old sister. She came home from school last Monday, crying. When I asked why, she said to me, 'People are blaming me in school for the Paris attacks'. She said , "I don't want to go back'.

I have a brother in year seven, he got bullied last week. People were telling him, 'your religion is killing people.'

This is something I have to go through every day.

People link us to terrorism, but we are not terrorists. They have hijacked our religion and used it against us.

I was in Tesco's just last week. I walked in, the guy goes, 'these are the people we want out of our country. These are the people you don't want around.'

So imagine if that was you. Coming into my country and I'm treating you this way. How would you feel?

So what can we do about it?

We can learn about each other's religions and cultures. We can stop making assumptions. We can be fair to one another.

And remember, when you tell somebody you're a terrorist because of your religion - it's a hate crime.  And you have to report it once you've viewed it.

My name is Isra Mohammed, I am a Muslim and I am not a terrorist.

Jon Stewart: 'One of my first memories was of Martin Luther King being shot', post 9-11 - 2001

20 September 2001, New York City, New York, USA

Good evening and welcome to the Daily Show. We are back. This is our first show since the tragedy in New York City and there is really no other way to start the show then to ask you at home the question that we asked the audience here tonight and that we’ve asked everybody we know here in New York since September 11, and that is, “Are you okay?” And we pray that you are and that your family is.

I’m sorry to do this to you. It’s another entertainment show beginning with an overwrought speech of a shaken host–and television is nothing if not redundant. So I apologize for that. Its something that, unfortunately, we do for ourselves so that we can drain whatever abscess is in our hearts and move on to the business of making you laugh, which we haven’t been able to do very effectively lately. Everyone has checked in already. I know we are late. I’m sure we are getting in just under the wire before the cast of Survivor offers their insight into what to do in these situations. They said to get back to work. There were no jobs open for a man in the fetal position under his desk crying. . . which I gladly would have taken. So I come back here and tonight’s show is not obviously a regular show. We looked through the vault and found some clips that we think will make you smile, which is really what’s necessary, I think, right about now.

A lot of folks have asked me, “What are you going to do when you get back? What are you going to say? I mean, jeez, what a terrible thing to have to do.” And you know, I don’t see it as a burden at all. I see it as a privilege. I see it as a privilege and everyone here does. The show in general we feel like is a privilege. Even the idea that we can sit in the back of the country and make wise cracks. . . which is really what we do. We sit in the back and throw spitballs -– but never forgetting that it is a luxury in this country that allows us to do that. That is, a country that allows for open satire, and I know that sounds basic and it sounds like it goes without saying. But that’s really what this whole situation is about. It’s the difference between closed and open. The difference between free and. . . burdened. And we don’t take that for granted here, by any stretch of the imagination. And our show has changed. I don’t doubt that. And what it has become I don’t know. “Subliminible” is not a punchline anymore. Someday it will become that again, Lord willing it will become that again, because it means that we have ridden out the storm.

The main reason that I wanted to speak tonight is not to tell you what the show is going to be, not to tell you about all the incredibly brave people that are here in New York and in Washington and around the country, but we’ve had an unenduring pain, an unendurable pain and I just. . . I just wanted to tell you why I grieve–but why I don’t despair. (choking back tears) I’m sorry. . . (chuckles slightly) luckily we can edit this. . . (beats lightly on his desk, collects himself).

One of my first memories was of Martin Luther King being shot. I was five and if you wonder if this feeling will pass. . . (choked up). . . When I was five and he was shot, this is what I remember about it. I was in school in Trenton and they turned the lights off and we got to sit under our desks. . . and that was really cool. And they gave us cottage cheese, which was a cold lunch because there were riots, but we didn’t know that. We just thought, “My God! We get to sit under our desks and eat cottage cheese!” And that’s what I remember about it. And that was a tremendous test of this country’s fabric and this country has had many tests before that and after that.

The reason I don’t despair is that. . . this attack happened. It’s not a dream. But the aftermath of it, the recovery, is a dream realized. And that is Martin Luther King’s dream.

Whatever barriers we put up are gone. Even if it’s just momentary. We are judging people by not the color of their skin, but the content of their character. (pause) You know, all this talk about “These guys are criminal masterminds. They got together and their extraordinary guile and their wit and their skill. . .” It’s all a lie. Any fool can blow something up. Any fool can destroy. But to see these guys, these firefighters and these policemen and people from all over the country, literally with buckets, rebuilding. . . that’s extraordinary. And that’s why we have already won. . . they can’t. . . it’s light. It’s democracy. They can’t shut that down.

They live in chaos. And chaos, it can’t sustain itself–it never could. It’s too easy and it’s too unsatisfying. The view. . . from my apartment. . . (choking up) was the World Trade Center. . .

Now it’s gone. They attacked it. This symbol of. . . of American ingenuity and strength. . . and labor and imagination and commerce and it’s gone. But you know what the view is now? The Statue of Liberty. . . the view from the south of Manhattan is the Statue of Liberty. . .

You can’t beat that. . .

David Letterman: 'They weren’t doing anything wrong, they were living there lives, they were going to work, they were travelling, they were doing what they normally do', post 9-11 - 2001

19 September 2001, New York City, New York, USA

Thankyou very much, welcome to the Late Show, this is our first show on the air since New York and Washington were attacked and I need to ask your patience and indulgence because I want to say a few things, and believe me sadly I’m not going to say anything new, and in the past week others have said what I will be saying here tonight far more eloquently than I’m equipped to do but if we are going to continue to do shows I just need to hear myself talk for a couple of minutes and so that’s what I’m going to do here. Its terribly sad here in New York city we’ve lost 5000 fellow New Yorkers and you can feel it, you can feel it, you can see it, its terribly sad, terribly, terribly sad, and watching all of this I wasn’t sure that I should be doing a television show because for 20 years we’ve been in the city making fun of everything, making fun of the city, making fun of my hair, making fun of Paul…well.

(Audience chuckles)

So to come to this circumstance, this is so desperately sad I – and I don’t trust my judgement in matters like this, but I’ll tell you the reason that I am doing a show and the reason I am back to work is because of Mayor Giuliani, very early on after the attack, and how strange does it sound to invoke that phrase ‘after the attack’ Mayor Giuliani encouraged us and here lately implored us to go back to our lives, go on living, continue trying to make NYC the place that it should be, and because of him I’m here tonight and I just want to say one other thing about Mayor Giuliani, as this began – and if you were like me and in many respects, god I hope your not,

(Audience chuckles)

but in this one small measure if you’re like me and you’re watching and your confused and depressed and irritated and angry and full of grief and you don’t know how to behave and you’re not sure what to do, and you don’t really – because we’ve never been through this before all you had to do at any moment was watch the Mayor, watch how this guy behaved, watch how this guy conducted himself watch what this guy did listen to what this guy said, Rudolf Giuliani is the personification of courage.

(Audience applauds)

And it’s very simple there is only one requirement for any of us and that is to be courageous -- because courage as you might know defines all other human behaviour and I believe because I’ve done a little of this myself -- pretending to be courageous is just as good as the real thing, he’s an amazing man and far better then we could have hoped for to run the city in the midst of this obscene chaos and attack and also demonstrate human dignity my god who can do that, that’s a pretty short list.

The 20 years we’ve been here in NYC we’ve worked closely with Police Officers and Fire Fighters and –

(Audience applauds)

and fortunately most of us don’t really have to think to much about what these men and women do on a daily basis and the phrase ‘New York's Finest’ and ‘New York's Bravest’ you know, did it mean anything to us personally, first hand, well maybe, hopefully but probably not, but boy it means something now doesn’t it, they put themselves in harm's way to protect people like us and the men and women from the fire fighters and the Police department who are lost are going to be missed by this city for a very, very long time, and my hope for myself and everybody else not only in New York but everywhere is that we never ever take these people for granted, absolutely never take them for granted.

(Audience applauds)

I just want to go through this, and again forgive me if this is more for me than it is for people watching, I’m sorry but I just I have to go through this, the reason we were attacked, the reason these people are dead, these people are missing and dead, they weren’t doing anything wrong, they were living there lives, they were going to work, they were travelling, they were
doing what they normally do, as I understand it and my understanding of this is vague at best, another smaller group of people stole some aeroplanes and crashed them into buildings, and we’re told they were zealots fuelled by religious fervour, religious fervour, and if you live to be a thousand years old will that make any sense to you, will that make any god damn sense.

(Dave takes a deep breath to prevent himself form crying)

I’ll tell ya about a thing that happened last night, there’s a town in Montana by the name of Shoto, its about 100 miles south of the Canadian border and I know a little something about this town, its 1600 people, 1600 people and it’s a – an ague business community which means farming and ranching and Montana‘s been in the middle of a drought for, I don’t know, three years and if you got no rain you cant grow anything and if you cant grow anything you cant farm, if you cant grow anything you cant ranch because the cattle don’t have anything to eat and that’s the way life is in this small town 1600 people, last night at the high school auditorium in Shoto Montana they had a rally – home of the Bulldogs by the way, they had a rally for NYC and not just a rally for NYC but a rally to raise money, to raise money for NYC and if that doesn’t tell you everything you need to know about the spirit the United States then I cant help ya, (Dave tears up) I’m sorry.

(Audience applauds)

And I have one more thing to say and then thank god Regis is here so we have something to make fun of.

(Audience laughs)

If you didn’t believe it before and its easy to understand how you might have been skeptical on this point if you didn’t believe it before you can absolutely believe it now, NYC is the greatest city in the world.

(Audience applauds)

We’re going to – we’re gonna try and feel our way through this and we’ll just see how it goes take it a day at a time, we’re lucky enough tonight to have two fantastic representatives of this town, Dan Rather and Regis Philbin and we’ll be right back.

Jane Clifton: 'Yes I am a baby boomer, but it's not my fault!' Deakin University debate - 2011

8 September 2011, Geelong, Victoria, Australia

Hi, my name is Jane and I’m a baby-boomer.

I’m sure you can you tell by looking at me – but just to refresh your memories:

First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they were pregnant.

They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can and didn't get tested for diabetes.

After surviving that trauma, we were put to sleep on our tummies in baby cribs covered with bright colored lead-based paints.

We were corralled in playpens and taken for walks on leads.

There were no childproof lids on medicine bottles, (I remember loving Junior Aspro – because they were square and pink) no locks on doors or cabinets.

We were driven home from hospital on our mother’s lap in the front seat of the car. No capsules, no booster seats, no seat belts, no air bags. Our parents’ cars had bald tires and sometimes no brakes.

We rode in the back of a ute standing up: we lay, stretched out to sleep in the back of the station wagon - special

We drank water from the garden hose and shared one soft drink bottle with four friends, and no one actually died.

We ate cupcakes, white bread, real butter and bacon.

We drank sparkalarkalark-a-ling Marchants Lemonade and home delivered Loys made with real white sugar.

But we weren't overweight.

Because we were always outside playing.

Running, always running.

We left home in the morning, to walk or catch the bus to school. We spent lunchtime and recess skipping, playing ball-games and hopscotch. Then we walked or bussed home and played in the streets until the lights came on.

When we rode our bikes, we didn’t wear helmets.

No one was able to reach us all day. And, we were O.K.

We did not have Playstations, Nintendo's and X-boxes.

There were no video games, DVD's, no surround-sound or CD's, no 150 channels on cable.

Face it, in my day, even though television had been invented, I didn’t know anyone who owned a set.

No personal computers, no Internet and no chat rooms, Facebook or Twitter.

We had actual FRIENDS – in 3D.

We went outside and found them!

We walked to their houses, knocked on the door or just walked in and talked to them.

We fell out of trees, got cuts and bruises, broke bones and teeth and no one sued anyone. Bit of Dettol and a plaster, and off you go.

We ate worms and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever.

We made up games with sticks and tennis balls and, although we were told it would happen, we did not put out very many eyes.

School sports had try-outs and not everyone made the team.

Those who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment.

There were no participation ribbons! Just winners and losers.

The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of. If the cops brought you home because of a misdemeanour, your parents actually sided with the law! And you got punished.

The past 50 years have seen an explosion of innovation and new ideas, and have produced some of the best risk-takers, problem solvers and inventors ever.

We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all.

Kind of makes you want to run through the house with scissors, doesn't it?

Yes, proud, Seniors Card-carrying baby boomer, me, it has been my great pleasure and privilege to create the world in 7 decades.

But it is not my fault the world’s in the state it’s in.

We came into being immediately following the end of hostilities at the close of World War 11, and you will note that since the creation of Baby Boomers there has been no World War 111.

Make love not war – we created that slogan.

War! Uh, good God, What is it good for? Absolutely nothin’. Say it again!

World wars are bad –we knew that instinctively.

Since Baby Boomers came into being we have, of course, noted that wars happen all over the world, every single day, with no possible end in sight, no chance of having an end or a beginning like the good old days, no sense of fair play or rules, and when one stops for a minute, another takes up the baton.

Baby Boomers have seen the vast proliferation of war in countries no one had ever heard of – well, not by that particular name -  over religions no one can even begin to comprehend, but none of this is our fault.

We were the peace, love and happiness generation and we stand proudly on our record that there has been no World War 111 on our watch.

Speaking of records – modern music is not our fault.

We created a perfectly formed set of tunes over a number of decades that obviated the need for anyone else to write new ones.

We created rock ‘n roll, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Janis, Jim, Otis and Jimi. Our last great work was Little Feat and it’s been downhill since then from Air Supply to Eminem to Lady Gag-me-with-a-spoon-I’m-so-stupid.

Madonna was not our fault.

Kylie was not our fault.

Boy George, Wham, Milli Vanilli, Bryan Adams and Jedward were not our fault.

We gave the world Aretha and The Band and Joni Mitchell and Gladys Knight and Leon Russell and Sam Cooke and the entire line-up at Monterey and Woodstock.

Modern music is reduced to sampling bits and pieces of Baby Boomer gold to stick in their monotonous, foul-mouthed nursery rhymes.

Speaking of foul-mouthed - the state of Aussie rules is not my fault.

The emergence and creation of the Australian Financial League, the AFL, is the work of the devil incarnate and is headed back where it came from – to hell in a handcart.

Granted, BBs can’t take credit for the creation of football, but we were perfectly content with the VFL, WAFL and SANFL and our generation saw out the last of its glory days, on suburban ovals around Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth, all of us perfectly content with its sense of loyalty and local pride.

The parlous state of football on television played on 2 and a half proper Victorian ovals and a handful of interstate grounds borrowed from cricket and rugby fixtures is shameful.

And speaking of games - don’t get me started on the Olympics!

The modern Olympic Games are not my fault. Let’s go back to the ancient Olympics where everyone competed in the nude – there’s your tv audience from the get-go.

The modern Olympic Games are not my fault. This is a sporting event where the hosting-rights bidding process is watched by more people than the final of the 100metre sprint.

Where more money is spent on the opening ceremony than the annual Gross National Income of some of the competing countries.

Sports people reached the outer limits of physical achievement decades ago – when the last of the Baby Boomer competitors reached their peak - and yet this extended advertorial disguised as a sporting event continues to push the myth that the contestants win their medals without a speedy cup of coffee before the starter’s gun.

Kids watching the Olympics know more about the contestants’ endorsement deals than they do about the country they’re representing.

A modern Olympic gold medal may well be a special moment to strive for, but a lucrative ad deal for breakfast cereal or chocolate spread is for keeps.

None of this is my fault.

And neither is the state of the environment.

Let me tell you a little story…

A Baby Boomer stood in line at the supermarket recently and was admonished at the check-out for not bringing her own bags, because plastic bags weren't good for the environment.   

The woman apologized to him and explained, "We didn't have the green thing back in my day." 

 To which the check-out chap responded, "That's our problem today. Your generation did not care enough to save our environment." 

He was right -- our generation didn't have the green thing.  Back then, we returned milk bottles, soft-drink bottles and beer bottles. And they got sent back to the bottler to be washed and sterilized and refilled, so it could use the same ones over and over.

We didn’t call that recycling – it just made sense.   

We walked up stairs, because we didn't have an escalator in every shop and office building. We walked to the shops and didn’t climb into a 300-horsepower machine every time we had to go two blocks.    

Back then, we washed the baby's nappies because we didn't have the throw-away kind. We dried clothes on a line, not in an energy gobbling machine burning up 220 volts -- wind and solar power…..

Kids got hand-me-down clothes from their brothers or sisters, not always brand-new clothing.

We refilled writing pens with ink instead of buying a new pen, and we replaced the razor blades in a razor instead of throwing away the whole thing just because the blade got dull. 

We bought a camera and used it until it fell to pieces – no disposable cameras.    

When we packaged a fragile item to send in the mail, we used a wadded up old newspaper to cushion it, not Styrofoam or plastic bubble wrap. We wrapped the garbage in yesterday’s papers and some of us even remember the days we cut up squares of it for use in the loo!

We didn't fire up an engine and burn petrol just to cut the lawn. We used a push mower that ran on human power.

We exercised by working, not by going to a health club to run on treadmills that operate on electricity.    

We had one electrical outlet in a room, not an entire bank of sockets to power a dozen appliances. And we didn't need a computerized gadget to receive a signal beamed from satellites 2,000 miles out in space in order to find the nearest pizza joint. 

There were no pizza joints, or takeaway. We cooked at home.

In the kitchen, we blended and stirred by hand.    

We had one TV, or radio, in the house -- not a TV in every room. And the TV had a small screen the size of a handkerchief, not the size of a bedroom sheet.  

But, no, we didn't have the green thing back then.    

Speaking of TV - Baby Boomers can’t take credit for the creation of television – that honour belongs to the generation before ours…what were they called? The Post WW1 Baby Boomers? The pre-labels-for-generation gen? Anyway, them.

We didn’t create it, but we enjoyed the new medium, in all its grainy black and white, problems-with-the-vertical-hold, bunny-eared, stick-a-hanger-out-the-window glory. But the state in which it now finds itself is definitely not our fault.

I lay the creation of reality TV fairly and squarely at the feet of Gen X Y & Z – the mobile phone generations, the everyone-must-be-on-tv-all-the-time gens.

We told stories – the Forsyte Saga, Roots, M*A*S*H, Homicide and Skippy. We used actors.

Andy Warhol was only able to envisage 15 minutes of fame, not 15 seasons of banal garbage, consisting of pointing a camera at anything to see if it moves: suck-it-and-see TV.

For a couple of years we had a daily 15 minute show about cooking, called Cooking with Kerr. Now we only have 2 types of show: shows about cooking, and shows about weight-loss. One shows us how to fill our faces, the other how to starve.

Look, it is fabulous that we have such a wide variety of food these days, but do we really have to spend so much time watching it being cooked? Huge hit in Africa, I imagine.

There may well be 150 possible TV channels on offer, but they offer a lot less value than the 2 we Baby Boomers enjoyed.

Don’t even start me on radio. That is really not my fault. If I wanted to listen to talkback I would have tuned in to 3AW or gone to live in Sydney. It is no longer MY ABC.

As I said at the start, like all Baby Boomers, I came into being as the result of a vast worldwide outpouring of lust that swept up my parents and all other human beings in the western world, in its all-consuming desire to have sex – in the vast sigh of relief at the conclusion of World War 11.

I am merely the result of this vast spawning – it’s not my fault I was born, it’s my parents’.

And I think you’ll find that’s pretty much the default setting for all Baby Boomers.

Jane Clifton is a singer, actress, author, and speaker, who is also as good a marriage celebrant as you're ever going to find. You can find her here.

Martin Luther King: 'Mrs. Parks is a fine Christian person, unassuming, and yet there is integrity and character there', Montgomery Bus Boycott - 1955

5 December 1955, Holt Street Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama, USA

My friends, we are certainly very happy to see each of you out this evening. We are here this evening for serious business. We are here in a general sense because first and foremost we are American citizens and we are determined to apply our citizenship to the fullness of its meaning. We are here also because of our love for democracy, because of our deep-seated belief that democracy transformed from thin paper to thick action is the greatest form of government on earth.

But we are here in a specific sense, because of the bus situation in Montgomery. We are here because we are determined to get the situation corrected. This situation is not at all new. The problem has existed over endless years. For many years now Negroes in Montgomery and so many other areas have been inflicted with the paralysis of crippling fears on buses in our community. On so many occasions, Negroes have been intimidated and humiliated and impressed-oppressed-because of the sheer fact that they were Negroes.  I don't have time this evening to go into the history of these numerous cases. Many of them now are lost in the thick fog of oblivion but at least one stands before us now with glaring dimensions.

Just the other day, just last Thursday to be exact, one of the finest citizens inMontgomery not one of the finest Negro citizens, but one of the finest citizens in Montgomery-was taken from a bus and carried to jail and because she refused to get up to give her seat to a white person. Now the press would have us believe that she refused to leave a reserved section for Negroes but I want you to know this evening that there is no reserved section. The law has never been clarified at that point.   Now I think I speak with, with legal authority-not that I have any legal authority, but I think I speak with legal authority behind me -that the law, the ordinance, the city ordinance has never been totally clarified.

Mrs. Rosa Parks is a fine person.  And, since it had to happen, I'm happy that it happened to a person like Mrs. Parks, for nobody can doubt the boundless outreach of her integrity. Nobody can doubt the height of her character nobody can doubt the depth of her Christian commitment and devotion to the teachings of Jesus. And I'm happy since it had to happen, it happened to a person that nobody can call a disturbing factor in the community. Mrs. Parks is a fine Christian person, unassuming, and yet there is integrity and character there. And just because she refused to get up, she was arrested.

And you know, my friends, there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression. There comes a time, my friends, when people get tired of being plunged across the abyss of humiliation, where they experience the bleakness of nagging despair. There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life's July and left standing amid the piercing chill of an alpine November. There comes a time.

We are here, we are here this evening because we're tired now.  And I want to say that we are not here advocating violence. We have never done that. I want it to be known throughout Montgomery and throughout this nation that we are Christian people. We believe in the Christian religion. We believe in the teachings of Jesus.  The only weapon that we have in our hands this evening is the weapon of protest.  That's all.

And certainly, certainly, this is the glory of America, with all of its faults. This is the glory of our democracy. If we were incarcerated behind the iron curtains of a Communistic nation we couldn't do this. If we were dropped in the dungeon of a totalitarian regime we couldn't do this.  But the great glory of American democracy is the right to protest for right. My friends, don't let anybody make us feel that we are
to be compared in our actions with the Ku Klux Klan or with the White Citizens Council. There will be no crosses burned at any bus stops in Montgomery. There will be no white persons pulled out of their homes and taken out on some distant road and lynched for not cooperating. There will be nobody amid, among us who will stand up and defy the Constitution of this nation. We only assemble here because of our desire to see right exist. My friends, I want it to be known that we're going to work with grim and bold determination to gain justice on the buses in this city.

And we are not wrong, we are not wrong in what we are doing. If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong.  If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong.  If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong. If we are wrong, Jesus of Nazareth was merely a utopian dreamer that never came down to earth. If we are wrong, justice is a lie.  Love has no meaning. And we are determined here in Montgomery to work and fight until justice runs down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream.

I want to say that in all of our actions we must stick together.  Unity is the great need of the hour, and if we are united we can get many of the things that we not only desire but which we justly deserve. And don't let anybody frighten you. We are not afraid of what we are doing because we are doing it within the law. There is never a time in our American democracy that we must ever think we're wrong when we protest. We reserve that right. When labor all over this nation came to see that it would be trampled over by capitalistic power, it was nothing wrong with labor getting together and organizing and
protesting for its rights.  

We, the disinherited of this land, we who have been oppressed so long, are tired of going through the long night of captivity. And now we are reaching out for the daybreak of freedom and justice and equality. May I say to you my friends, as I come to a close, and just giving some idea of why we are assembled here, that we must keep-and I want to stress this, in all of our doings, in all of our deliberations here this evening and all of the week and while—whatever we do, we must keep God in the forefront. Let us be Christian in all of our actions. But I want to tell you this evening that it is not enough for us to talk about love, love is one of the pivotal points of the Christian face, faith. There is another side called justice. And justice is really love in calculation. Justice is love correcting that which revolts against love.

The Almighty God himself is not the only, not the, not the God just standing out saying through Hosea, "I love you, Israel." He's also the God that stands up before the nations and said: "Be still and know that I'm God, that if you don't obey me I will break the backbone of your power and slap you out of the orbits of your international and national relationships." Standing beside love is always justice, and we are only using the tools of justice. Not only are we using the tools of persuasion, but we've come to see that we've got to use the tools of coercion. Not only is this thing a process of education, but it is also a process of legislation.

As we stand and sit here this evening and as we prepare ourselves for what lies ahead, let us go out with a grim and bold determination that we are going to stick together. We are going to work together. Right here in Montgomery, when the history books are written in the future somebody will have to say, "There lived a race of people a black people, 'fleecy locks and black complexion’, a people who had the moral courage to stand up for their rights. And thereby they injected a new meaning into the veins of history and of civilization." And we're gonna do that. God grant that we will do it before it is too late. As we proceed with our program let us think of these things.

But just before leaving I want to say this. I want to urge you. You have voted [for this boycott], and you have done it with a great deal of enthusiasm, and I want to express my appreciation to you, on behalf of everybody here. Now let us go out to stick together and stay with this thing until the end. Now it means sacrificing, yes, it means sacrificing at points. But there are some things that we've got to learn to sacrifice for. And we've got to come to the point that we are determined not to accept a lot of things that we have been accepting in the past.

So I'm urging you now. We have the facilities for you to get to your jobs, and we are putting, we have the cabs there at your service. Automobiles will be at your service, and don't be afraid to use up any of the gas. If you have it, if you are fortunate enough to have a little money, use it for a good cause. Now my automobile is gonna be in it, it has been in it, and I'm not concerned about how much gas I'm gonna use. I want to see this thing work. And we will not be content until oppression is wiped out of Montgomery, and really out of America. We won't be content until that is done. We are merely insisting on the dignity and worth of every human personality. And I don't stand here, I'm not arguing for any selfish person. I've never been on a bus in Montgomery. But I would be less than a Christian if I stood back and said, because I don't ride the bus, I don't have to ride a bus, that it doesn't concern me. I will not be content. I can hear a voice saying, "If you do it unto the least of these, my brother, you do it unto me."

And I won't rest; I will face intimidation, and everything else, along with these other stalwart fighters for democracy and for citizenship. We don't mind it, so long as justice comes out of it. And I've come to see now that as we struggle for our rights, maybe some of them will have to die. But somebody said, if a man doesn't have something that he'll die for, he isn't fit to live.

Preeminent MLK historian Dr Clayborne Carson, the man chosen by Coretta Scott King as the founding director of the Dr Martin Luther King Centre for Education and Research, was a guest on the podcast, talking about I Have a Dream and other speeches.



Elie Wiesel: 'Indifference, the most insidious danger of all', Nobel Prize acceptance - 1986

Video available at Nobelprize.com

10 December 1986, Stoickholm, Sweden

According to Jewish tradition, there are moments where one must make a blessing and give a benediction, and this is such a moment. With your permission, your majesty, this is such a moment. [gives blessing - Hebrew]

Thank you oh lord for giving us this day ...

It is with a profound sense of humility that I accept the honor, the highest there is, that you have chosen to bestow upon me. I know: your choice transcends my person. Do I have the right to represent the multitudes who have perished?

Do I have the right to accept this great honor on their behalf?

I do not. That would be presumptuous. No one may speak for the dead, no one may interpret their mutilated dreams and visions. Yet at moments such as this I sense their presence, I always do. I sense my parents. I sense my little sister. How can I not sense, how can I not sense the presence of those who were part of you. Friends, teachers, companions.

But this honour belongs to those who remember them. This honour belongs to all the survivors, to their children, and through us, to the Jewish people with whose destiny I have always identified.

I remember: it happened yesterday or eternities ago, a young Jewish boy discovered the kingdom of night. I remember his bewilderment, I remember his anguish. It all happened so fast. The ghetto. The decrees. The persecution. The deportation. The sealed cattle car. The fiery altar upon which the history of my people and the future of mankind were meant to be sacrificed.

I remember that young boy asked his father: "Tell me" he said, "Can this be true?" This is the twentieth century after all. This is not the Middle Ages. Who would allow such crimes to be committed? How could the world remain silent?"

And now that very boy is turning to me: "Tell me," he says. "What have you done with my years? What have you done with your life which is mine?"

And then I tell him that I have tried. That I have tried to keep memory alive. That I have tried to fight those who would forget. Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices. We could not prevent their deaths the first time. But if we forget them they will be killed a second time and this time it will be our responsibility.

So I also explained to that boy how naive he was, how naive we all were -- the world did know and remained silent. And that is why I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation.

We must speak. We must take sides. For neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.

Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.

Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant.

Wherever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must – at that moment – become the center of the universe.

Of course, since I am a Jew profoundly rooted in my people's memory and tradition, my first response is to Jewish fears, Jewish needs, Jewish crises. For I belong to a traumatized generation, one that experienced the abandonment and solitude of my people. It would be unnatural for me not to make Jewish priorities my own. It would be unnatural for me not to love Isreael with all my heart, as I do.

Please remember what I remember. Isreal if god forbid defeated, it would be the end of Israel. The only country in the world which is so endangered totally in its existence. How can people such as myself not think in these terms.

But I am also of course committed to Soviet Jews who need freedom. And Jews in Arab lands who need solidarity. But I said that Jewish priorities are my first priorities, but they are not exclusive. Others as important to me. Other people, other ideas, other situations, other tragedies matter to me.

Apartheid is, in my view, as abhorrent as anti-Semitism. To me, Andrei Sakharov's isolation is as much of a disgrace as Josef Biegun's imprisonment, and Ivan Nudl's exile. As is the denial of Solidarity and its leader Lech Walesa's right to dissent. And Nelson Mandela's interminable imprisonment.

There is so much injustice and suffering crying out for our attention: victims of hunger, of racism, and political persecution. Certain fascist regimes, like in Chile, or Marxist regimes like in Ethiopia and other places of the world, where writers and poets are prisoners, and there are so many prisoners in so many lands -- by the Left and the extreme left and by the Right and the extreme right.

Now you know as I do that human rights are being violated on every continent. More people are oppressed than free. How can one not be sensitive to their plight? Human suffering anywhere, concerns men and women everywhere. And in spite of what some extreme critics have said about me,  that principle applies in my life also to the Palestinians, to whose plight I am sensitive but whose methods I deplore when they lead to violence.

Violence is not the answer. Terrorism is the most dangerous of answers. I know they are frustrated, and that is understandable, and something must be done about it. The refugees in the refugee camps and their misery, the children and their fear, the uprooted and their hopelessness, I know. Something must be done about their situation, I know that too.

Both the Jewish people and the Palestinian people have lost too many sons, and shed too much blood. This must stop. And all attempts to stop it must be encoruaged, peacefully.  Israel will cooperate, I am sure of that. I trust Israel, for I have faith in the Jewish people. Let Israel be given a chance, let hatred and danger be removed from her horizons, and there will be peace in and around the Holy Land.

Yes, I have faith. I have faith in the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. I even have faith in His creation. Without faith no action would be possible. And action is the only remedy to indifference. Indifference, the most insidious danger of all. Isn't this the meaning of Alfred Nobel's legacy? Wasn't his fear of war a shield against war?

There is so much to be done, and there is much that can be done. I have learned it in my life, one person – a Raoul Wallenberg, an Albert Schweitzer, a Martin Luther King -- one person of integrity, of courage, can make a difference, a difference of life and death. And therefore I know that as long as one dissident is in prison, our freedom cannot be true. As long as one child is hungry, our lives will be filled with anguish and shame. For I have seen children hungry. What all these victims need above all is to know that they are not alone; that we are not forgetting them, that when their voices are stifled we shall lend them ours, that while their freedom depends on ours, the quality of our freedom depends on theirs.

This is what I say to the young Jewish boy wondering what I have done with his years. It is in his name that I speak to you and that I express to you my deepest gratitude. No one is capable of gratitude as one who has emerged from the kingdom of night. We know that every moment is a moment of grace, every hour is an offering; and not to share them would mean to betray them and mean not to be worthy of them. Our lives no longer belong to us alone; they belong to all those who need us desperately.

Thank you, Chairman Aarvik. Thank you, members of the Nobel Committee. Thank you, people of Norway, for declaring on this singular occasion that our survival has meaning for mankind.

Robert Rabbin: 'I don’t care if cancer is still with me or not, because I’m living with something truer', response to terminal cancer diagnosis - 2015

To listen to this speech, select track three in this list.

13 April 2015, Los Angeles, California, USA

I don’t know what you were doing in November 2011, but I was in Bali, teaching a weeklong retreat based on my eighth book, The 5 Principles of Authentic Living. For six months prior to Bali, I had suffered from muscle spasms in my back that would buckle my knees, drop me to the floor, and blind me with pain. I could scarcely walk, but I had committed to teaching in Bali, so I loaded up on painkillers and flew from L. A. to the retreat site.

When it was over, I was finished: exhausted, weak, sick, and in pain. I knew I couldn’t make it back to L. A. Instead, I went to the much closer Australia, where I had recently lived for six years. I went downhill fast. Lying down, I couldn’t lift my legs; I could barely wiggle my toes. On December 24th, yes, Christmas eve, I was admitted to the ER of a local hospital.

I didn’t know that I was entering a school that would soon transform everything I had ever known or been. A few days later, I was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer — you know, the terminal kind. My spine, pelvis, and hips were riddled with tumors. I was rushed into a series of radiation treatments, which relieved the pressure on my spinal nerves and prevented me from losing my legs to paralysis.

That was the good news. The other news was that, statistically, I had six months to live. But seeing as how I’m standing before you this evening, it’s clear I’ve exceeded the doctors’ predicted expiration date by nearly three years. I’m quite happy about this; not so much because I’m still alive, but because I always take delight in doing what I’m not supposed to do.

And just for the record, I am not a statistic. When word got around that I had become a spring-break hotel for millions of cells-gone-wild, teachers and teachings came from everywhere. Oncologists, metaphysicians, friends, colleagues, students — all had suggestions as to how to fight cancer. I received tips about nutrition, emotional clearing, European and Mexican clinics, cannabis oil, breath work, psychic intervention, herbal supplements, and, of course, juicing.

I started thinking that if cancer didn’t kill me, this well-meaning but overwhelming tsunami of information would! But then I received a message from my meditation teacher, Swami Muktananda — with whom I had lived and studied for 10 years. Even though he had died in 1982, he managed to get this message to me: “Robert, don’t say you have cancer; if you must say something, just say that you are holding the space for cancer to visit you temporarily.”

That message triggered a game-changing epiphany. I decided that cancer was a condition, not my defining reality. I decided that my response to cancer would create my reality. So, I shifted the focus of my listening from outside to inside, where an irresistible voice started speaking to me from the depths of my being, but in silence.

This inner silence taught me many things — about cancer, the nature of self, and living authentically, which has been the focus of my life since I was 11. When I began “holding the space for cancer to visit me,” a lot of people started telling me what I should do.

It was tempting to simply obey the “experts,” thinking that they knew. Yes, they knew what they knew, but not what I was beginning to know, courtesy of silence. For example, not long after my last chemo treatment, my doctor asked how I was getting on with my life. I told him. I didn’t go out, socialize, exercise, or take walks on the beach. I didn’t have a pet; not even a houseplant. I hadn’t joined a cancer support group. I didn’t have any burning ambition or clear goals. I wasn’t having sex, with myself or anyone else.

He said I was clinically depressed and prescribed anti-depressants, which I assured him I would take, but I never did. He didn’t understand that in my solitude and silence, I was being taught important, maybe life-saving things. I did listen to the experts, but I didn’t automatically do what they said. I didn’t let them choose what I should do. I realized that it was up to me to choose.

So, I developed a discerning disposition. I questioned everyone and everything until I was satisfied. I wasn’t bullied or intimated by what anyone told me to do. I challenged the status quo of convention and popular opinion. For example, in all the messages I received, it was clear that no one wanted me to die. That was nice to find out. Everyone wanted me to fight hard and defeat cancer.

But I never felt that I should go to war and fight to survive. I thought it was better to become friends with cancer. I wasn’t afraid of dying, nor angry about this sudden turn of events. I was at peace with the prospect of moving on, even though there were still things I wanted to do, like teach what I had learned about authentic living and speaking truthfully.

Still, I felt that death was not my enemy; after all, it has been with me from the first moment of my existence. I know I disappointed many people when I told them I had made death my friend and that I wasn’t going to start a war against cancer. During the months of my chemotherapy treatments, I could only eat refried beans and fried eggs and drink watermelon juice. I dropped forty-five pounds. My body glowed with toxicity. I spent twenty-three hours a day in bed. I was barely a vegetable.

But my attention had turned from “terminal” cancer to inner silence. I started going on numerous trips to . . . I don’t know where. I called them pony rides to oblivion. My consciousness left me and went where I couldn’t track. Each time my consciousness returned, it came back with less of me than when it had begun that journey.

One day, I ceased to exist in the way I had existed up until that time. Those pony rides to oblivion devoured everything I had ever known as “me”: page by page, the history of my life was shredded — all the mental photos, memories and mementos — gone. Desires, goals, aspirations, fears, hopes, wishes — gone. Time disappeared. Conceptual language collapsed. Everything I had been, everything I had known, everything recognizable was gone — except silence, and what comes to life in silence.

It’s hard for me to say what came alive in silence, what is alive within me now. Since my pony rides to oblivion, words themselves don’t have the same power to convey meaning, though I love words and speaking: my professional motto for 30 years has been “Have Mouth, Will Travel.” What really matters now is where my words come from. I know the difference between speaking about, and speaking from, the difference between philosophy and embodiment. I can recognize the difference between surface and depth, between petty and profound, between trendy and timeless beauty.

I don’t care if cancer is still with me or not, because I’m living with something truer, something that silence installed in me as a kind of existential app that has erased all other programs, leaving me with this: I live from my soul. If I want to say something from my true heart, I say it now. If I want to do something from my molten center, I do it now. I live from deep silence, and that makes me happy because maybe now I can do what I’ve tried to do my whole life: be a blessing to myself and to everyone I meet, and bring some much needed grace into this world.

David Bridie: 'For God's sake Australia, have a look at the map!', Lowy Institute Lecture on PNG - 2015

2 December 2014, Lowy Institute, Sydney, Australia

Australia is a better country when it engages with its immediate neighbours in Melanesia. We are vastly different, but we are neighbours. We should learn from each other, we should be fascinated with each other, we should engage, we should assist, we should respect, we should collaborate and we should definitely listen to each other. If we do so, we will both be better off. More to the point, to be situated so close to this Melanesian wonderland and to ignore it, is foolishness in the extreme.             

Dip your toes into Melanesia and you will find evolving constitutions of emerging post-colonial states, an astounding array of species of flora and fauna (Google the way the Bird of Paradise turns itself inside out in its mating ritual), bright coloured coral fish that make a Leonid Afremov painting seem dull in comparison, active volcanoes, kustom, culture and conflict.

If you ever get the chance to look at an aerial photograph from Saibai Island in the Torres Strait over to the South coast of the Western Province of PNG, they are surprisingly close; it’s almost as if Australia is land locked.  You could wade through this stretch of water at low tide.

My now departed good friend, filmmaker Mark Worth, once wrote a letter to The Australian newspaper venting his frustration at Australia’s lack of concern for Papua New Guinea and the troubles in West Papua with the short sentence, “For God’s sake Australia, just have a look at the map”.

As a young child in the outer suburbs of Melbourne I remember flicking through an Australian atlas my parents had that contained a section on PNG at the back. The accompanying pictures featured intriguingly strange and different flora and fauna. The orchids, birds and death adders fascinated and amazed my active child’s mind. It was a terrain so vastly different to our immense flat dry ancient continent. 

Papua New Guinea should have been a source of massive fascination to Australia.  One of only two former Australian colonies, the place of wartime and pre-colonial history, home to a quarter of the world’s languages, and some of the most culturally intact peoples on the planet. People still living on the same land, working the same gardens and singing the same songs as generations of their ancestors.

This is where it was all happening.  But like our adherence to Hollywood, it was the USA’s backyard we fell for, not our own.

Our loss. 

At the age of 21 I started a band called Not Drowning, Waving with a wonderful guitarist named Johnny Phillips. In the arty world of the inner suburbs Melbourne music scene we projected films on the wall behind the stage and our visuals guy was the aforementioned fella - Mark Worth, who was also a filmmaker in his own right.

Mark had spent the first 16 years of his life on Manus Island, now infamous as the site of the processing centre for our so called “illegal” asylum seekers.  Mark’s father Geoff was in the navy at Lombrum near Lorengau.  

Mark would regale us with stories of growing up in PNG as we sat up late drinking beer after our gigs on tour. He could talk under water, a maus wara as he would be called in PNG - an enthusiast.  He said to me: “David, for your first trip overseas, don’t go to Europe, the UK or the USA. They are much the same as here. It’s an increasingly homogenous world. As a musician, as a person wanting to create and shift your thought patterns, you must go to PNG. PNG is a wonderland, it is life in the raw, and it is like going to another planet, it is, as they say, the Land of the Unexpected”

Hanging around the cultural sanctum of inner suburbs Melbourne in my university days, students and hipsters were more aware of the stories of America’s satellites such as Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala than we were of our own Melanesian neighbours. It wasn’t as if there was not much of interest going on there; civil wars in Timor Leste, West Papua and Bougainville and the newly independent Vanuatu.

Surely our engaged young minds should have been fixed on our close regional neighbours? But I knew bugger all.  I would have thought any student with interest in the fields of history, science, geology, medicine, botany and especially religious studies would have found a wealth of intrigue in these countries. 

Mark had by now started the Super 8 club in Melbourne and made a film called ‘Duwai bilong Ninigos’, about the canoe makers from the remote Western Islands of PNG who would collect large floating logs that had wound their way out from the Sepik river 200 miles to the south of their remote atoll – master craftsmen of the sea. Mark enticed me to compose the soundtrack to his humble short documentary.  He played me recordings of pulsating Manus Island garamut drumming, joyous ukulele and 4-part harmony stringband music by the influential Paramena Strangers and the wall of sound that was Sanguma.

Sanguma incorporated traditional sing sing tumbuna music from a range of cultural groups all over PNG into their blend of funk and jazz.  When they came and played a gig at The Venue, Melbourne’s principle rock venue, I was gob smacked as I witnessed pulsating garamut drumming, Sepik bamboo flutes, jews harps and cascading vocal chants - sounds I had never heard before. As a musical artist always in search of inspiration and something new, this was one of the greatest gigs I had ever witnessed.

As a result of this engagement from afar, the hooks of PNG had begun to sink into my consciousness.

Melanesian Adventure namba one

In 1986, I followed through on Worthy’s advice and booked myself on my first overseas trip to PNG. I managed to convince four other mates, two men and two women, to accompany me on a holiday that took in Moresby, the Sepik, Madang, Manus, New Ireland and Rabaul. It was to change my life.

Escaping the Melbourne winter - ples bilong ice box as singer George Telek would come to call it- we spent a whirlwind two days in the dry bustling capital of Port Moresby.  We drank duty free gin with Henry - a young man we befriended at Jacksons Airport Customs - at 10pm on the foreshore Ela Beach, only to be told the following morning that under no circumstances should you ever go down to Ela beach after dark! Henry drove us around the settlements to visit his wantoks in the wee hours of the morning, my head spinning with the effects of the alcohol and the stunning excitement of being in a place where everything was new. I was gawking at every vista; my antenna was on full alert. It was only on further visits that it dawned on me that Moresby is a place where people come to find work and a party life, but often end up getting stuck there because it is expensive. And apart from the local Motuan people, these migrants of urbanisation don’t have land, contributing to the city’s edgy vibe.

Moresby was very different then from what it is now; an exciting burgeoning city whose time has arrived, with a growing middle class, a sense of confidence and pride and a beauty of its own, largely thanks to many of Powes Parkop’s urban policies of planting trees, placing artifacts in parks and roundabouts and keeping it clean.

From Moresby we travelled to the small bustling town of Wewak in the northwest. This was something different again. After an afternoon of body surfing out the front of the Windjammer Hotel with its puk puk bar, we headed down to the mighty Sepik River - one of the world’s great waterways. We definitely weren’t in Kansas anymore.

Sitting in the long dugout canoes as we headed up the tributary to Chambri Lakes, our guides were singing traditional melodies over the drone of the outboard motor.  We passed heavily populated village after village, smoke from riverbank fires gently wafted into the air, sago and yam gardens were visible beneath tropically ascending cloud formations. The Sepik had a heat to it unlike anything I’ve experienced. The temptation to dive in and cool off was mighty, but as Jeff Buckley discovered much to his detriment, these big rivers have a forceful current that you don’t argue with. The current flowed strong and dragged with it large clumps of land that floated down the centre, carrying birds hitching a ride out to the coast.

The Sepik village culture and art is astonishing; the ornate Big Haus Tambarans, the carvings, the people, and the songs rich with story. Lying awake inside my mosquito net in the small haus kunai huts where we slept, I listened to the symphony of insect and bird noises and accompanying village sounds of dogs, chickens and tok ples chatter and tried to take in all that we had witnessed in the preceding few days. This wasn’t my world. This was something completely different. Village life has a thick humid grass-roots atmosphere and ambience to it that I still to this day find inspiring. It is life in the raw. What you see is what you get. It challenges your preconceptions and it can be confronting, with few of the comforts of suburban life. I was in a foreign wonderland.

Grassroots village life makes you see the world somewhat differently. You stop and let life wash over you. Life slows down, colours are intense, sounds reverberate. The western world could learn much from the way these societies treat their elderly (lapuns) with respect, value their knowledge, and look after them with their extended family system. Our technologically savvy children could do well to observe the way children in PNG villages contribute to the necessary responsibilities of gardening, sweeping and caring for the family, not to mention the physical activity of climbing kulau trees and diving for fish and lobster that is everyday life for PNG kids.

Like the art of the central desert of Australia, the Sepik take on carving and design is idiosyncratic and multi-layered. In all my travels since, I have rarely come across a place with such unique and inspired artistic and cultural practice. Chambri Lakes is the home of my great friend the master mambu (bamboo flute) player Pius Wasi. Pius formed a band called Tambaran Culture after leaving Sanguma where he had been a junior member of the band. Tambaran Culture became an integral part of the Not Drowning, Waving touring party and Pius has been a musical companion to me ever since. He is a man of genuine cultural knowledge and we have collaborated on film soundtracks, recordings, festival music and dance performances.

We boarded a trade boat to Madang, sailing past the symmetrically perfect volcanic island of Manam as the sun rose gently on the cool clear morning. Fat schools of tuna leaping out of the shimmering ocean, villages scattered along the distant shore, the gentle rock of the boat crammed amongst travellers with bilum bags full of kau kau and unfortunate chickens on their way to market.

Then it was on to Manus, the old Admiralty Islands. Through a family friend of Mark’s, Jim Paliau, we ventured by ocean-going outrigger to the small coral Ponam Island.

Manus is home to the unique garamut drumming, an intricate ensemble style of drumming where the syncopated rhythms are understood better as melodies and dance accompaniment, played on elaborately carved slit log drums of different sizes. In two years’ time Not Drowning, Waving would venture back to Ponam Island for two weeks of recordings with these master drummers.

From Manus we caught the short flight to bilas peles (beautiful place) Kavieng, the main town of New Ireland province. After a night in the old Kavieng Hotel, where I was confronted with a man stuck in the maddening midst of malarial fever, we caught a liberating ride on the back tray of a copra truck, wind in our hair as we belted down the Bulimiski Highway named after the grand poo bah of the German New Guinea rule pre-World War One. We stayed a night in a glorious cliff top colonial house with an old school plantation owner who was an example of the bad old days, with appalling attitudes to the locals and a revolver in his side pocket.

From Namatanai we caught a short flight into the jewel of the Pacific, Rabaul, the old capital of PNG up until World War Two that gets its name from the Kuanuan word for mangrove. The flight takes you through the volcanoes, circling the harbor onto the runway on the isthmus, an enchanting descent into one of the most picturesque places I have ever been.

Namba two ples bilong mi

Ah, Rabaul - this was the beginning of something special – musically and personally.  That was my first visit – I have (so far) returned 35 times. It is my second home. Before the volcano destroyed the town in 1994, Rabaul was the jewel of the Pacific.  Mango Avenue, Casuarina Avenue, Queen Emma’s steps, the tree lined streets, the market abundant in produce.  Anything and everything grows in the rich soil of the Gazelle peninsula.

Catching a PMV bus in from near Kokopo to Rabaul town, I kept hearing this wonderful song “Abebe” by George Telek and the Moab Stringband. It was a bouncy stringband with a vocal to die for, about a butterfly spirit (Abebe means butterfly in the local tok ples, Kuanuan).

At this time, Rabaul had a thriving music industry - two 24 track-recording studios, Pacific Gold and CHM that ran 24 hours a day, seven days a week. There were gigs every night and Rabaul was home to two of the biggest PNG rock bands, Barike and Painim Wok (Telek’s rock band, doing a reformation tour in 2015), as well as a plethora of wondrous stringbands; Gilnata, Moab, Langa Vibrations, Revanmates and Junior Devils to name a few. Telek’s earlier stringband was The Junior Unbelievers Stringband, a great band name given the excessive missionary influence throughout the Pacific Islands.

Later that day I dropped into the Pacific Gold Studios, and serendipitously met George Telek and Glen Low.  Later that evening we caught up again at a barbecue on Pila Pila beach, staring out to Watom Island.  George, Glen and I drank SP, ate kakaruk (chicken) and talked about music. Both were huge Beatles and Credence fans, George still is, sadly my wantok Glen passed away from complications of Diabetes six years ago.

This was a fascinating conversation, three musicians from totally different worlds but our common link of music gave us a common language. Telek is the closest thing PNG has to a bona fide rock star. At the time Painim Wok cassettes were selling all around the country in massive numbers. The band’s co-founder John Warbat dressed in leather pants and jacket even during afternoon gigs with the temperature sitting at 33 degrees Celsius and 100% humidity, shredding away guitar hero style.

Little did George and I know that this barbecue on the beach would lead to us working together for the next 29 years, collaborating on the Not Drowning, Waving ‘Tabaran’ album, followed by me producing his five international solo albums plus one for the Moab Stringband, with an abundance of accompanying tours to all parts of Australia, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, the UK, USA and Europe. Telek would also collaborate with artists such as Archie Roach, Kev Carmody, Youssou N’Dour, Suzanne Vega, Bart Willoughby, Jimmy Little, Ngaiire and a host of others and garner an OBE for services to the PNG music industry. His anthem West Papua (Freedom) has such a following among West Papuans that it has become their defacto national anthem.

Not Drowning, Waving performing with George Telek, Photo: David Bridie

On my last night in Rabaul I spent the night in Raluana, Telek’s home village, and chilled down on the beach at Nrab point. Gazing out over Simpson Harbour, to the Beehives rock formation in the middle, to Nordup on the far side, to Tavurvur, the smallest of the volcanoes near Matupit - the one that would do the most damage in the 1994 eruption - I pondered how much history these people had witnessed over the last century and how much of this history Australia was a part of.

The 6-day war at Blanche Bay where the handsome Talili fought on behalf of his people in one of the first examples of organized native defence is a great feature film in the making. The life of the influential missionary George Brown, the Samoan Queen Emma and her commerce initiatives.  A German colony under Albert Hahn up until 1918, the Germans had an organized tram system and set up very fruitful plantations and commercial enterprises.

From there the Tolais endured British and then Australian rule where the town of Rabaul was the capital, until we left it high and dry in the lead up to the Japanese invasion. The local Tolai people and many Australian nurses, civilians and soldiers were caught behind Japanese lines to fend for themselves. Also of note was the sinking of the POW ship the Montevideo Maru where over 400 Australian POWs and nurses were killed.

JK McCarthy’s biography ‘Patrol Into Yesterday: My New Guinea Years’ is a riveting read.  One of the most positive accounts to come out of the Kiap and coast watcher era, McCarthy had the wisdom of Solomon about him and is perhaps the guiding example of what respectful engagement between our two countries should look like.

It is a cracking read.

Of equal fascination is the Matanguan Society’s role in agitating for indigenous rights in the lead up to independence, fortified by their Tumbuan society and secret belief system that has law and order, political and social objectives, represented in ritual form by the male Duk Duk and female Tubuan dances. Being secret, it was able to survive the vast changes brought about by missionary and colonial influences and remains strong and relevant today.

Leaving Rabaul we returned to Port Moresby, which was revealing having spent two months in the regions.  Moresby made more sense now after being out in Sepik and the islands.  We made a final visit to the museum, the Institute of PNG studies and the grand Parliament House; three important institutions that are still operating and are must-see places.

As we boarded the plane home at Jackson’s Airport, lining up with Australian mine workers straight out of their security compounds, my mind was filled to the brim with the exotic places and people of Papua New Guinea. Sounds and stories. Images and songs. Questions and enquiries. And many of these questions were not just about PNG but also about Australia-the way we live, the way we think, our approach to this wondrous world we find ourselves in.  My world had been shaken up and stirred. My approach to music and sound would never be the same again.

Christopher Hitchens: 'A celestial dictatorship, a kind of divine North Korea', Munk Debate - 2010

This is an edited version of the Munk Debate versus Tony Blair - 'Is religion a force for good in the world'. The full debate is on Speakola here.

Once you assume a creator and a plan, it makes us objects, in a cruel experiment, whereby we are created sick and commanded to be well. I'll repeat that: created sick, and then ordered to be well. And over us, to supervise this, is installed a celestial dictatorship, a kind of divine North Korea. Greedy, exigent—exigent, I would say more than exigent—greedy for uncritical praise from dawn until dusk and swift to punish the original sins with which it so tenderly gifted us in the very first place. However, let no one say there's no cure: salvation is offered, redemption, indeed, is promised, at the low price of the surrender of your critical faculties. Religion, it might be said—it must be said, would have to admit, makes extraordinary claims but though I would maintain that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, rather daringly provides not even ordinary evidence for its extraordinary supernatural claims. Therefore, we might begin by asking, and I'm asking my opponent as well as you when you consider your voting, is it good for the world to appeal to our credulity and not to our skepticism? Is it good for the world to worship a deity that takes sides in wars and human affairs? To appeal to our fear and to our guilt, is it good for the world? To our terror, our terror of death, is it good to appeal? To preach guilt and shame about the sexual act and the sexual relationship, is this good for the world? And asking yourself all the while, are these really religious responsibilities, as I maintain they are? To terrify children with the image of hell and eternal punishment, not just of themselves, but of their parents and those they love. Perhaps worst of all, to consider women an inferior creation, is that good for the world, and can you name me a religion that has not done that? To insist that we are created and not evolved in the face of all the evidence. Religion forces nice people to do unkind things and also makes intelligent people say stupid things. Handed a small baby for the first time, is it your first reaction to think, "Beautiful, almost perfect, now please hand me the sharp stone for its genitalia that I may do the work of the Lord"?

... Well now, in fairness, no one was arguing that religion should or will die out of the world, and all I'm arguing is that it would be better if there was a great deal more by way of an outbreak of secularism. And I knew it would come up that we'd be told about charity, and I take this very seriously, because we know, ladies and gentlemen, as it happens, we're the first generation of people who do really, what the cure for poverty really is. It eluded people for a long, long time. The cure for poverty has a name, in fact: it's called the empowerment of women ... try it in Bangladesh, try it in Bolivia, it works—works all the time. Name me one religion that stands for that, or ever has. Wherever you look in the world and you try to remove the shackles of ignorance and disease stupidity from women, it is invariably the clericy that stands in the way, or in the case of—now, furthermore, if you are going to grant this to Catholic charities, say, which I would hope are doing a lot of work in Africa, if I was a member of a church that had preached that AIDS was not as bad as condoms, I'd be putting some conscience money into Africa too, I must say. But it won't bring—I'm sorry, I'm not trying to be funny. If I was trying to be funny, you mistook me. It won't bring back the millions of people who have died wretched deaths because of their teaching. That still goes on. I'd like to hear a word of apology from the religious about that, if it was on offer ..

... Do we grant to Hamas and to Hezbollah, both of whom will tell you, and incessantly do, "Look at our charitable work. Without us defending the poor of Gaza, the poor of Lebanon, where would they be? And they're right, they do a great deal of charitable work. It's nothing compared to the harm that they do, but it's a great deal of work all the same ...

...We don't require divine permission to know right from wrong. We don't need tablets administered to us ten at a time in tablet form on pain of death to be able to have a moral argument. No, we have the reasoning and the moral suasion of Socrates and of our own abilities. We don't need dictatorship to give us right from wrong, and that's my lot, thank you.

...I'm intrigued now, so religion could be a good thing after all, sometimes, we think, is now the proposition. What would a religion have to do to get that far? Well, I think it would have to give up all supernatural claims. It would have to say no, you are not to do this under the threat of reward, heaven, or the terror of punishment, hell. No, we can't offer you miracles. Find me the church that will say, "Forget all that. Faith healing, no." It would have to give that up. It would have to give up the idea of an eternal, unalterable authority figure who is judge, jury, and executioner, against whom there could be no appeal and who wasn't finished with you even when you died. That's quite a lot for religion to give up, don't you think? But who would not say we would be better off without it if it was, or what Tony Blair would like it to be like it to be, an aspect of humanism, an aspect of compassion, an aspect of the realizations of human solidarity, the knowledge we are all in fact bound up with one another, that we have responsibilities one to another, and as I do when I give blood, partly because I don't lose the pint forever, I can always get it back, but that there's a sense of pleasure to be had in helping your fellow creature. I think that should be enough, thank you.