We cannot indulge in the luxury of despair. We need to engage in the hard work of hope

“The future is not what it used to be.”

‘Now is not the time to watch and weep.
 It is the time to stand and fight.’

This, from the French poet Paul Valéry, who died in 1945, best sums up how I feel about the year that has passed.

Nothing bears this out as powerfully as the overwhelming horror of the climate emergency. But there is more. With defeats for the progressive side of politics in Australia and the UK, this year was stamped with assaults on the rights of workers (including those who are in unpaid work or who are residualised by the labour market and increasingly denied the right to social security), wage stagnation as a deliberate design feature, rising unemployment and precarity, a flattening of the tax system, a housing crisis, deeply worrying free trade deals, an epidemic of gendered violence, unabated systemic violence against First Nations people, a steady dismantling of the public sector, a diminution of the public sphere and the placement of strictures on democracy.

Not to mention the vicious repeal of Medevac and the prospect of a retrograde religious discrimination bill.

And now the nation is burning. And people cannot breathe. Not a metaphor. Not a good year.

Read the story from The Guardian by John Falzon - “We cannot indulge in the luxury of despair. We need to engage in the hard work of hope.”