Tobe Frank: You have a choice

To be frank trawling through Facebook is sometimes like trawling through a rubbish tip.  There’s an occasional gem, but mostly it’s other peoples’ shit.

I’m sick and tired of my wall being tarnished with the whining’s of the NIMBY’s, the do-gooders and the vocal minority who too often get too much airplay because good news doesn’t sell.

One of my particular bug bears are the memes from people claiming not to be racist but banging on about ‘my country’ this and ‘my country’ that and ‘if you don’t like it you can go back to your country’.

Well let me tell you people, one of the greatest things about this wonderful country of OURS is the freedom of choice.   It’s not MY country and it’s not YOUR country… It’s OUR country.  We share it… We all contribute to making it what it is.  No one person owns it, controls it, nor dictates our choices.  That’s a really big part about what makes it great.

You have the choice to live where you want to.  You have the choice to work where you want to. You can celebrate whatever religion you want to.  You can choose to believe in the big bearded man in the red suit or you can choose to simply enjoy the retail sales that come hand in hand with it.

You can choose to wear a burka, you can choose to wear stubbies, chesty-bonds and pluggers.  You can even choose to wear your birthday suit (on some designated beaches).

You can choose to eat meat or you can choose to try and extract your nutritional requirements from lentils, spinach and quinoa.  If you want to buy halal meat, then this country has given someone the choice to open a shop selling halal meat because people choose to buy it.  There’s a business right there, employing people and providing an honest income.  There’s also a Meat’n’Potatoes butcher a few doors down sellin’ $2/kg bbq snags made up of things you’d probably prefer not to know about… But hey, that’s alright too.

You can buy local, Australian made, or you can buy an import.  It’s up to you.

And the benefit of having this choice in Australia is that you can walk down the street on a Friday night and choose to eat at the local Japanese, Tibetan, Nepalese, Brazilian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Indian, Korean, Thai, Sudanese, German, Ethiopian, French or Martian restaurant.  Or you can choose to stay at home and have beans on toast.

The sooner people on both sides of the fence realise that we should all just get on with getting on, this country will be better for everyone.  Maybe it’s the fence that needs to go?  If everyone just respected each other’s choices we’d have a lot less agro in this world.  You don’t have to agree with it, you don’t have to participate, you don’t even have to understand it, but I implore you to respect it… Your fellow countryman has made a choice, and you should respect that.

Don’t force your choice on someone else who may choose differently to you, but be open to learning more about their choice, so maybe one day you will understand.

But whatever you do, don’t hide behind it in a veil of anti-racist diatribe online.  It is racist.

The only person it says something about is you.

Do you feel people force their opinions onto others too much? Are we forgetting about freedom, a principal that Australia prides itself on?