IdentityIdentity
Today is the first day of the rest of my life. I mean that. I am determined to become the person I always wanted to be.
When I woke this morning from troubled dreams I decided to transform myself. I was lying on my back and by lifting my head a little I could see my big toe poking out from under the end of the bedclothes. I thought: this is it — that jumbo digit's trying to tell me something.
"Suppose I went back to sleep for a little and forget all this nonsense", I thought. But the more vigorously I tried to doze the more my thoughts drifted back to the possibilities of what I could become as soon as I placed my foot with its cheeky appendage on the cold bedroom floor.
What a step for one man it was going to be! I was going to arise determined to create the new me. I was going to be a contender; to be somebody; to be something other than the person I had become. I wanted a new identity, a new and better life for myself.
And then I fell asleep again and forgot all about these things until lunchtime. After I had eaten a meat pie and sauce I knew straightaway that of all the possibilities open to me, being a vegetarian was not going to be one of them.
Then I picked up the newspaper.
I recommend the print media as a ready reference guide for a search such as mine. The morning daily is chock full of snippets of the lives of those who made it ... and those who didn't. And one could not find a better catalogue of role models if it's a new life one's after.
After failing to find a ready niche for myself in the employment section — that came as no surprise — and after reading the obituaries without lament — I knew none of the deceased (poor dear departed that they are) — I soon turned to the Pauline Hanson pages.
You know the format: another statement from the chosen one matched with a tut-tut or two from some notable who resents the impact she's having on trade or tourism. But her message is clear: "For crying out loud! You gotta stand by your mates in this world. You're an Aussie, for chrissake! A dinky-di, true-blue son (yeah, and daughter too) of Oz. You're one of us. Not one of them. So you can tell the wogs, the chinks, the abo's and those poofters too, to piss off! We don't want their kind here."
Mine is a rough summary, but that's pretty much what she's on about. Her's is a coarse nationalism.
But on this occasion she spoke to me. I read her message like a revelation: Is the new me to be one of "us" or one of "them"? Sure, I could sit in the front row of a One Nation launch and no one would think otherwise. I could pass as a Hansonite or, for that matter, a follower of John Howard. My roots in this country go a long way back — all the way back to the last century at least!
If I was going to be anything maybe my new identity could do with an indigenous flavour? I could learn to cooee and drink my tea out of a cracked enamel mug, or forget propriety and learn to swear with more imaginative gusto and drop all my "h's".
"Struth!" I could do all those things. But I could never live the lie that Hanson and Howard preach. I could never define the new me by insisting that what I was depended on what I wasn't. So I decided on my transformation. In future, whoever Hanson and Howard choose to denigrate, blame or belittle, that's who I shall be. They're one of us, because I'm one of them.
Dave Riley
E-mail:dhell@ozemail.com.au