...the cool cats and babydolls here (stole your lingo there, Krups)...and why?

Why are these people viewed by you as such?

i'm trying to figure what your question is... it doesn't make any sense, if you ever read any of my posts you would already have that answer, and also, i'm trying to figure out what your trying to lure me into here



I am not luring you into anything....

I am merely reflecting back your logic...and asking you to look at your own logic...which will either support or won't, your statements.

so what is your point here?



Is that your response to the questions?......even more fascinating...

So you are completely happy and content with every single thing in your country?

Blissed out by every single scrap of anything that happens in your country?


Fascinating.

Wow!


Are you always this horrible to your own countrymen....some of the people who are also 'free'...?

Do you people do this on the streets to each other?

Or are these your secret thoughts, transmuted electronically?


Wow....and I had hoped the rest of the world was wrong...but then...we don't really exist, do we?

I wonder, Dragoness....

About a lot of things...I ponder...strategise...consider..

I feel that there has been so much irrepairable damage done to your collective ego, (as a Nation)...and yes, I am generalising...your economy, your politics, your military, your people...


There's an unpleasant taste in many people's mouths, an unsettled and disturbed feeling when veiwing the whole thing from go to whoa...almost ten years to roll through, like a slide show...

I am going to don my flak jacket and hide all the soapboxes with my next comment...


You know what this reminds me of?

America's moment of being dragged into the second world war....Pearl Harbour...to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

9/11...to today...


No condemnation of actions...(I'll keep them private)....simply the similarities of actions, of perspectives.

It all seems quite extreme in response to initial acts.

Not very important at all....


A person's character can be assassinated.

A person's credibility.

It's a word...and we all attach our own perception to it.

I suspect the 'apparent' person in question was 'killed' in one faction's mind...another faction will see it as an 'assassination'...yet another faction will see it as murder.


It depends on the perspective with which you see from....and also the energy attached to it.

It's kind of the same here Josie...although we aren't in a city, we are in a tiny little town in the backblocks of nowhere..

My kids have shared their days with every known nationality...a dear 'like an uncle' owns a Backpacker's Hostel, which my kids have haunted since the youngest was 4... and my kids can now swear in maybe 14 different languages ...they can cook traditional dishes in maybe 12....and have no idea what prejudice is.

They have learnt Japanese, Indonesian, Maori, French, and Italian through school...and can learn any language they want through School of The Air/Distance Education, if they so want.

My littlest spoke with a Canadian/quasi American accent when she was little...and I thought she was watching too much tv...!...It was her ear catching all the different accents from the backpackers.

Geeez Tessa....sounds extremely tense and aweful for both you and your fella.

I don't know enough about your laws in regards to custody, access and marriage, non-marriage...and I can't offer any advice other than, you love him, you support him emotionally, and you want the best for him and his kids....which you are already doing.

I guess it is time to look at how long both of you can maintain your own relationship without buying into her dramas...if you are ok with having to be only in his life, minus his time spent with his kids...then you have all you can expect....for now.

I would travel with him...you both deserve a holiday...enroute to his kids...and on the return...and I guess you look for alternative accomodation for you..

She doesn't need to know you are in town...you are none of her business.

Maybe THAT'S why I am still single!!!

I mourn the loss of all lives...your people's, my people's...and every single one that was an innocent.

I mourn for all the mothers, fathers, children...

What happened on 9/11 was a travesty....an abhorrence....vicious, callous, and cruel.


What has come since, has mirrored it.

Perhaps it is not the death insomuch, as the dance of Vengeance...not justice....that has much of the world viewing America in a disparaging way.

It is also the attitude of 'Collateral Damage' that the world is led to believe your countrymen prescribe to...that over a million people have lost their lives....off US Soil in these long, costly tedious wars....all targeted to apparently liberate a country from tyranny...and to hunt down a figurehead.

Do you realise the grief your country has caused other people of THEIR countries because of your wars?

A pretty hollow victory dance, in the eyes of orphaned Iraqis, and widows of Afganistan.....of innocent 'Collateral Damage'....and in many of the world's eyes.

"WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ABOUT OUR COUNTRY TRYING TO TAKE OVER (OR DESTROY) THIS WORLD?"


You can't handle my thoughts on your country trying to take over/destroy the world.


....and the more you yell...the less I listen.


Thanks for the fire and brimstone sermon...if you ever give up cheffing...perhaps you could take up religion?

Something just caught my eye that I overlooked in my post to you JB...


In the early goldrush days of the 1800's we were inundated with Italians, Chinese, Germans, Dutch, French, Malays.....many, many other countries' people...and it shows in the diverse cultural 'flavours' of our different cities and states...South Australia is predominantly of Germanic origins...Melbourne/Victoria a blend of Asian/Italian origins/cultures....many Dutch originated settled in Western Australia....Darwin in the extreme north...Malay/Italian/Dutch...Queensland...a mixture of Greek/Italian/Asian/Malay...We are such a mixed bag of cultures dating back to the early 1800's...

The idea we were pushed with white populace is kind of redundant from the early 1800's...and remember we were first claimed/discovered in 1770..

As to populating this country through England, after we were no longer viewed as a colonial gaol/outpost.......the children of Britain were in the late 1930's to mid 1940's...then came the advent of the Ten Pound Pom...

A fare of ten pounds was paid by any Brit that wanted to emmigrate to Australia from the late 1940's to the mid 1960's...

They were housed, and supported, using the ration card method of the war time...for most of the late 40's and early mid 50's...(similar to today with our refugees who get through the immigration system, they are housed and paid social welfare until establishing themselves).... and after the mid/early fifties went onto our current social welfare system....to assist them until such time as they could support themselves.

Our ties with Mother England....are still there...although in almost all things we are self governing, and self supporting...and ironically, there are a minority who push for a Republic.

The everyday Australians perhaps have a high tolerance, or simply don't care that we are part of the Commonwealth...formerly the British Empire...and we kind of view Britain as the granny in the corner, with her knee blanket over her.

My children have meandered in and out of many religions....under the watchful eye of their Mumma Cat, in their early years.

They have been exposed to Christianity in many of it's formats, including Catholicism, Baptist, Anglican and Presbytarian, Buddhism, Taoism, Ananda Marga, Muslim/Islam, The Bagavatghita, Hari Krishnas, Seventh Day Adventists, Paganism...and so on and so forth.


I choose to allow my children to learn of other and any religions, same as I allow them to learn of other countries, histories, and any of the Sciences...

...it is how I show respect to their individuality.

It's kinda funny....you showed a typical example of how an aussie goes about things...perhaps in a polite stomp your foot kind of way....certainly without the fangs and claws I grow...

Is that a dyslexic Aloha???

Why?


Why are you supposed to act superior....(better) than the rest of the world?

Where did you get that delusion from?

Is it inherited?

hello JB....thankyou for your honesty in sharing that you have hardly any knowledge of Australian History.

Josie, had elaborated somewhat for you, in the very first time I have seen her cranky... ...


During the Second World war we had a real pickle here in Australia...the Pacific Campaign...which is where your guys entered...was a rather tense and challenging time for this country...there were serious concessions being planned when the Japanese invaded Australia...

We were a small country, already stretched to the wahzoo with our military at the time..(we were an agricultural and resource export country...and not very militarised)...as most of them..(our army, navy, airforce) were off in Europe helping Mother England.

It is fascinating to learn that a line had literally been drawn across the country from south of Townsville, all the way across to Broome in Western Australia...(have a look on a map)...giving japan the northern half-ish of Australia...Josie
s city included...Darwin.


Our troops fought a bloody war in Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Borneo against the Japanese...have a look at The Kokoda Trail..alongside US and new Zealand troops.


The stolen generation of british children happened around the 1930's late in that decade, and continued on through the war....those kids were thought to be safer in Australia...as it looked at the time Hitler was going to take Britain....and yes, they were lied to...told they had relinquished their children, or the children were told their parents had died....not by Australian governments...but rather under direct orders from England.


Our history is one of violence...we were original immigrants of thugs and theives...the worst of the worst, in the 1770's...shipped off to Australia the colonial gaol.

Oppression was rife...and lasted well into the early 1800's....ironically, a few minor bloody battles...nothing but a mere skirmish in comparison to your history...The Eureka Stokade...to name but one...moved this country into a more self governing and peaceful place.

Our Federation of states came about, and we quietly moved into freedom...we still do take it all for granted...perhaps it's the aussie way...

Josie shared a very simple example of our mindsets as a country, in that we debate fiercely, tease and torment fiercely on everything with each other...and all the while we are laughing, at and with each other...even when debates become so heated and violence occurs...most times...the winner helps the loser up, dusts him off, and goes and buys him a beer.

We're a larrikin country, full of clowns, and not one's to believe our own propaganda...we're tough, and hard as a country's character...we have to be...we are all extremely isolated from each capital city of each state...and our country is a harsh unforgivable land..she bakes us dry, she drowns us out...then smiles with amazing skies at us.

In the movie crocodile Dundee...Mick Dundee is a satire of the typical aussie...and yet we all related...we all know a Mick Dundee type here...and we all laugh at ourselves, and the Mick's of this country.


Our early European settlement is a shameful horrible part of our history, and the Indigenous Australians...you may know them as Aboriginals) are still in many ways treated as second class citizens by the government.

Our past is not one of peaceful co-existance...we did not integrate peacefully in this land...or rather our ancestors from Britain did not...they brought their prejudices and racial discriminations with them.


Our present, is as I described it...we don't becry at every opportunity our rights, our freedoms....we just get on with them...we all know how close it was to not being the way we are...and without your country's retaliation on japan....freedom may be something we would be aspiring towards.

This is interesting, thankyou Ms Harmony...for the contradictions have long sat with me...as an outsider, with completely different perceptions, (not being an American)....I have long struggled with the dichotomies you have mentioned.


I am not patriotic...whatsoever...unless there is a 'global patriotism'...not that I even like labels of any kind.

I am blessed to live in a country where we don't pronounce at every opportunity our freedoms...we simply live them.

We here in Australia are not immune to prejudice, both being and receiving...although our heritage as such is very clear to us, that the majority of the populace were all immigrants at some time...we are such a melting pot of cultures that it is kind of ludicrous to be prejudiced....although it does happen.


I always find the need to voice one's freedoms quite fascinating....it's like, for me, that it is almost a 'Does one doth protest too loudly'....and I wonder if it infers that there really is no freedom of speech, especially given the restraints placed upon your people after the Patriot Act was initiated.

I guess I am attempting to say it is so foreign to me, the mindsets of your culture...and the apparent contradictions and bluured logic...as for me....I am blessed by where I live...and we simply get on with it...we don't need reminding to be 'patriotic' nor that we are 'free'.


Anywhoo...thankyou for this topic....it's interesting reading, the different feedback in here.