#Strongwomen. "I write about the power of trying, because I want to be okay with failing. I write about generosity because I battle selfishness. I write about joy because I know sorrow. I write about faith because I almost lost mine, and I know what it is to be broken and in need of redemption. I write about gratitude because I am thankful – for all of it." Kristin Armstrong
Remember this campaign? Will it fix our e-bike problem?
Watch it again and then ask yourself a serious policy question: is this the answer to Kiama’s e-bike problem?
The Pinkie campaign understood something about teenage boys that every threat misses. The whole performance is for an audience,They think they are bulletproof. Fines bounce off them. Warnings bounce off them. The road toll belongs to other people. Could laughter from the girls on the corner be the answer
Kiama has tried the enforcement route before. I mean well before. In the 1880s this town had a big hoon problem. Mobs of forty and fifty boys patrolled the streets from ten o’clock. They damaged everything in sight. Joseph Weston lobbied hard for his solution, “bring back the whip”
Larrikinism, he thundered, was “a social and moral infection which should be stamped out like small-pox”
In November 1883 he got his wish. “LARRIKINS BEWARE! The ‘Cat’ has arrived.” Triangles, a cat-o’-nine-tails and two taws came down from Sydney on Saturday’s steamer, and the magistrate a Mr Connell announced he would happily show the appliance to anyone desirous of seeing it at the court-house. Kiama invented the pop-up exhibition a century early.
In March 1884 the cat made its courtroom debut, produced before three youthful offenders to rattle them. The delinquents smiled. The Bench promised them a taste of it next time. By the close of 1885 the cat was still waiting for its first customer, the most feared instrument in the British penal system reduced to a conversation piece with viewing hours.
This week Council opened a portal where residents can report e-bike incidents. Same recipe, new appliance. Acquire the instrument with fanfare, then wait for the teenagers to reform themselves. The boys on Collins Street will smile at the portal exactly the way the larrikins smiled at the cat, assuming word of it ever reaches them.
Which brings me back to the pinkie. It cost less than a steamer and it frightened more teenagers than the cat ever did. So here is my alternative submission to Council: skip the portal, commission the ad. Or save the money entirely. Collins Street, Saturday night, all of us on the footpath, little fingers raised.
I’ve just had a big birthday. The kind with a zero in it. You move into a new decade whether you’re ready or not.
Walking into the restaurant, half a dozen people I wasn’t dining with wished me happy birthday. That’s a small town for you. I’m noisy in this community. I have opinions, I used to write for the paper, and everybody knows what I think. Every time we have an election, people are convinced I’m standing for council. Apparently I’m just what council needs.
This post challenges that idea. Our community doesn’t need me. One person can’t deliver what this community deserves, and neither can nine. It needs an engaged community working together, not keyboard warriors: informed people with the skills to make sure the bureaucrats are working for us.
Around my own table were Greens, Labor supporters, independents and friends who had stood for council themselves. Between us we had campaigned, letterboxed, handed out how-to-vote cards and argued for change across more elections than any of us cared to count. If anyone in this district believed in democracy, it was us.
For the record, I’ve never voted for a party in my life. I vote for the person. Over the years that has meant I have voted Liberal, National, Labor, Greens and independent.
The talk turned to council. A councillor had resigned, and the by-election to replace him will cost ratepayers about $200,000. Our council is broke. That’s $200,000 it doesn’t have. The question went around the table: what could one councillor achieve when the bureaucrats seem to have the rest under their thumb?
This is how bad it is. I know our councillors. That’s what my year at the paper gave me. They spend a lot of time on social media trying to work out what the community cares about. So they’re hearing the loud voices, and like most communities, we have plenty of loud voices who all want different things.
I said I’d love to see us try what a district in north-east Victoria did. Build the community first. Find out what people want. Learn to solve problems together, and worry about who to elect after that.
One of my oldest friends smiled and said, “Here comes Pollyanna.”
I know her well enough to understand what she meant by that. Her focus was looking after her friend. She knows what twenty years of heart and soul in agriculture, encouraging people to believe we’re all in this together and the win-win is there if we go after it, had cost my mental health. I had witnessed failure first hand, and neither of us wanted a repeat. That’s how much my friends care. So I listen. I came home and had a big think about whether she was right.
This post is the big think. It ends in an electorate nobody at my dinner mentioned.
In December 2012, a small group from north-east Victoria got eleven minutes with their federal member, Sophie Mirabella. The meeting ended when she told them, “The people of Indi aren’t interested in politics.”
Her district knew her by then. She had boycotted the Apology to the Stolen Generations. She had stood beside Tony Abbott in front of the “Ditch the Witch” signs. Neither time did she ask her community what they thought. They had a member who didn’t speak for them.
They went home and proved her wrong.
The push had started with two young people who grew up in the district and moved to Melbourne for work, because they believed there was nothing at home for them. They decided to do something about it. The generation who had stayed backed them: young people with the idea, older people with the networks and the skills. Between them they ran hundreds of kitchen table conversations, asking what people wanted for the region.
And they argued. Some of the group wanted a seat at the table in Canberra. Others wanted the focus on the community itself. It was the same argument we had at my birthday dinner. Then they did what makes this movement so smart. They agreed to disagree and kept working, until they were confident the community was engaged and that a tilt at the seat was what the community wanted.
Before the 2013 election they wrote down what success looked like: engaged community members turning a safe seat into a marginal one. Winning came last on their own list of aims.
They won anyway. They unseated a frontbencher. They kept meeting between elections. When Cathy McGowan retired, the community chose Helen Haines, and the seat has now been theirs across five elections.
Hardly anyone in New South Wales has heard of Indi, and I’ve come to think that is the strength of it. They did it for the district, not for the fame.
My friend is right. People are hard to organise. Indi is proof that hard and impossible are different words.
It also helped me work out what all the council talk is about. When my neighbours decide I’m standing, it’s the habit we’ve all fallen into: find one noisy person, hand them the problem, and wait. Indi swapped that habit for a better one: believe you can do it yourselves.
We’re already proud of where we live. Imagine being proud of what we build together. Our dry stone walls have stood for a hundred and fifty years. They’re under threat and the reason they’re still standing is our community made it clear it cares about them. What we love survives because we stand up for it. That is true of walls, and it’s true of towns.
The people who wrote Indi’s story down ask a question.
“Have you wondered who is hearing your voice, listening to your community?”
My answer is the power is in your hands, too
So Pollyanna has a question of her own. Why does organising ourselves sound less realistic than spending another $200,000 on another election?
I have spent a lifetime at farm kitchen tables, and in every conversation the problem is someone else’s to fix. The council’s. Canberra’s. The person who never rang back. So we elect a politician every three years, and we wait.
Look at what that actually asks of them. I hand over my problem. My road, my rates, my paddock. So does my neighbour, and his neighbour, and every voter in the electorate. The politician ends up holding thirty thousand separate problems, most of them pulling against each other, and no honest hope of fixing them all. Politics becomes a queue of grievances, and campaigning becomes promising to move you up the queue. The politician can only promise, disappoint, and be replaced by a rival who promises louder. The loudest dog in the yard wins, every time. We built this machine, and then we blame the politician when it does what it was always going to do.
And while we queue, the big calls get made without us. Here’s how it works in my valley. A dairy farm comes up for sale. A Sydney buyer pays more than any farmer could ever earn back from milk, because he’s not buying a farm, he’s buying a view for six weekends a year. The farm next door is now worth city money too, so when that farmer retires, no young farming family can afford it either. Sale by sale, working farms become holiday homes that stand dark most of the year.
And it doesn’t stop at the farm gate. Every sale drags the price of an ordinary house up with it. Kiama is now the most expensive place to buy a home in regional New South Wales, dearer than Byron Bay. The nurse at the hospital can’t buy here. The teacher can’t. The kids who grew up here can’t. There is no affordable housing here, and no social housing. The school loses children, the shops lose staff, and the town that made the views worth buying slowly stops being a town. It becomes a postcode with scenery. Mosman with a blowhole.
Nobody chose this. There was no meeting about where it was all heading, no vote, no moment anyone could point at and object to. Each sale was legal and each seller had every right. But add it all up and my district has been rezoned by the market, one sale at a time, and nobody ever asked us what the best outcome would be for the farms, the buyers, the nurses the kids or the community. I watch it from my own front gate.
So here is the problem: we hand our say to a politician with thirty thousand problems in the queue, and the calls that change our districts get made elsewhere, by the market, the local council, the state government. What’s left for the rest of us is Facebook, one keyboard at a time. Each of us finds our tribe there, and the tribe does what tribes do: agrees with itself, louder every year. Plenty of conversations. Never one table.
And here is the goal: communities with the knowledge, confidence and skills to find the best outcome for everyone affected.
One rural community in north-east Victoria worked out how to get everyone to the same table, and it’s still going strong five elections later. In my next post I’ll tell you what they did. Then I want to work on the question that follows with you: how do we do it in every district in Australia?
FI have a rule about agricultural stories on LinkedIn. I keep scrolling, unless Karin Stark wrote them.
Last week I broke it.
The post asked why any young person would choose agriculture when farming often feels like a fight with government.
That caught my eye, because the young farmers I know are still choosing it. Succession. Land prices. The money it takes to get started. Those are the barriers in my part of the world. Agriculture here is also attracting young women from urban areas, women who have chosen farming with their eyes open.
Then came the line that sent me in a different direction.
No other industry or profession has to put up with this.
Plenty of industries do. We all live with forms of social control every day. We have licences to drive. Permits to renovate. Working with Children Checks to volunteer at the school canteen. Certificates to serve alcohol. Council approvals for sheds. Dogs are registered and microchipped. A council ranger can fine you for walking one in the wrong place or leaving its mess behind.
Most of us renew permissions all the time.
Farming is different.
A person can buy land tomorrow and call themselves a farmer. Farmers work inside rules, inspections and regulations, but the occupation itself has very little formal licensing. No registration board. No annual renewal. No professional body that can take the title away.
As a dairy farmer, I was licensed under food safety laws. That licence covers what I produce rather than me. Farmers who use restricted chemicals need accreditation. Water has rules. Chemicals have rules. Food safety has rules.
Farmers did the training. We learned the rules. Then we went further. We brought in accredited specialists, precision technology and contractors who could put the right product in the right place. This morning, a contractor’s drone was working in the paddocks outside my front window. This is modern farming too. Training. Skill. Technology. Rules taken seriously.
When a clear standard is set, farmers usually meet it. Often they go past it.
The licence still sits mostly on the product, the chemical, the water or the process. The person doing the farming carries something else. Public trust.
The public trusts us to manage land, draw water, run animals and produce food. That trust has no renewal date. It has no form to fill in. It has no annual fee.
It can feel like freedom, until public trust shifts. Anyone who watched the live export debate knows how quickly that can happen.
Before I came back to farming, I was a community pharmacist. Pharmacists renew their registration every year. They have to show they are fit to practise and prove their professional development hours. The annual renewal can be annoying, and it also keeps the profession’s standing current.
Pharmacists also pay a serious annual levy to the Pharmacy Guild. In all my years behind the counter, I rarely heard pharmacists complain about it. They could see what it bought.
The Guild has delivered five-year Community Pharmacy Agreements under governments of both colours. It has kept location rules in place in a way few small business sectors have managed. Its method is simple. A pharmacist in every electorate. A relationship with the local MP. Clear requests. Pressure used carefully.
The noise stays in reserve. That is why the threat of it counts.
A strong lobby lets its members get on with their business while skilled people handle the influencing.
I want that for farmers.
Twenty-five years ago I came back to farming, and land clearing was the argument of the day. Peak bodies answered aerial mapping with press releases. Too often, they still reach for the same tools. Press release. Rebuttal. Rally. Submission.
Those tools have their place. They are not a strategy on their own.
Influence is a skill. It can be learned. And the research is consistent: people trust people. They are wary of institutions. A farmer telling their own story will always be more convincing than a spokesperson reading a statement.
Through Action4Agriculture we spent years training young people in agriculture as their own spokespeople. We brought in experts from around the world to teach it. The skills are available. Agriculture has invested in many things before investing in its people.
Members can see activity more easily than they can see influence. A rally looks like action. Quiet influence is harder to put in a newsletter. The risk is that organisations start proving they are busy, rather than showing what has changed.
The lobbies that win in this country often make less noise. The Pharmacy Guild. The clubs. The mining industry. The property lobby. People may have strong views about whether those groups serve the public interest. They know how influence works. They know who to talk to and when to move. They know when a public campaign helps and when it harms.
Agriculture starts with something many of those industries will never have. People still have genuine affection for farmers.
Farmers are trusted in rural electorates. They have the stories. They understand the land. They can explain what is at stake better than anyone sitting in an office far from the paddock.
The decision-makers are knowable. MPs, advisers, departments, councils, agencies, journalists and community leaders can be reached when the industry is disciplined about who speaks, what is being asked for, and why it matters.
Too often, peak bodies stand between farmers and decision-makers, speaking over both.
Influence is a skill. It can be learned. I spent years running a national program that taught young people in agriculture how influence is built. We brought in experts from around the world to teach it. The skills are available. Agriculture has invested in many things before investing properly in that.
Every farmer I raise this with points to the same problem. Fragmentation. Cotton, dairy, grain, livestock, irrigators, dryland farmers, each with its own body, board, chair and table.
Farmers have seen this before. Dairy deregulation. Processor mergers. Banks leaving town. Bigger and fewer has often meant further away and less accountable. That concern comes from experience.
Perhaps the starting point is making better use of the structures agriculture already has.
The National Farmers’ Federation exists. State farming bodies exist. Commodity bodies exist. The challenge is getting them to speak with one clear voice when it counts.
Three state farming bodies recently found that voice on water. That points to what is possible.
Joining forces one issue at a time can win a round. The harder task is turning that discipline into a habit, so agriculture is heard before the fight begins, rather than once everyone has retreated to their own corner.
I do not have the full answer.
Agriculture has trusted people in every electorate, stories people care about, and a public that still wants to believe farmers are part of the solution. The question is whether our representative bodies are prepared to use all that with more discipline.
Other industries deal with scrutiny, rules, licences, audits and governments that test their patience. So does every individual. We renew proof all the time.
Agriculture has been given something rarer. A licence built on public trust.
That is the one we renew in how we farm, how we speak, and how well we use the trust we still have.
Here is the trick nobody runs an ad campaign about. The watchdog ends up working for the dog. And once you see how, you cannot unsee it.
Are you as baffled as I am? One Nation has almost no policies to speak of. It lurches from one embarrassing headline to the next, a fresh gaffe from a candidate every other week, and then, like clockwork, climbs again in the polls. In a couple of the big national surveys it now sits ahead of Labor. None of the usual rules seem to apply, and for the life of me I could not work out why.
This is the point where, as my best work usually does, it turned into me getting cranky. I do not think a third of the country has fallen for Pauline Hanson. I think it is anger, the kind that builds when people feel nobody in charge is listening. So instead of yelling at the television like a sensible person, I went looking to see whether anyone had studied why people end up feeling that way. A great many clever people have, for the best part of sixty years, and they have given it a pile of important-sounding names. I have left most of the jargon at the door.
I am sharing it because I have been trying to make sense of this country, and I figured somebody must have worked it out already. They had. And it is not really a story about One Nation at all. It is a story about who gets listened to, and who does not. Here is what I found.
It comes down to one rule. A small group that cares enormously about one thing will almost always beat a big group that cares only a little about a lot of things. Once you see it you cannot unsee it.
Getting organised is hard work and it costs money. A handful of gambling companies, each with millions riding on the outcome, will happily pay for lobbyists, lawyers and ad campaigns, because the payoff to each of them is huge. The rest of us each lose a little, spread thin across the whole country, so not one of us has much reason to down tools and fight. The organised few beat the unorganised many, even though the many are far bigger. An economist named Mancur Olson set this out in 1965, and nobody has knocked it over since.
The red flag to watch for is a policy that hands a big win to a small group and spreads the cost thinly across everyone else. The small group fights like mad, because the stakes for each of them are enormous. Gambling advertising is the perfect example. The broadcasters and betting firms make a fortune, and the cost is paid in small, scattered harms across thousands of kitchen tables.
Noticing is not the same as power. The gap between what we can see and what we can change is where the anger lives.
The textbooks say we do not notice costs spread that thin. They are wrong. We notice. We notice the betting ad in every break of the footy. We notice when a friend cannot stop, when the pay disappears before the bills are paid, when a marriage falls apart over hidden debt, when someone we know loses the house or worse. Noticing is exactly why people are angry. The trouble is that noticing is not the same thing as power. Anger spread across millions who each lose a little is no match for a handful of companies with millions each on the line and the minister’s mobile number. We can see it perfectly well. We just do not have the machine to do anything about it.
None of this is because people are switched off. We notice. The harder question is why noticing so rarely turns into the organised pushback that actually shifts a policy. Fighting a lobby head on is a second job. It means turning up to every review, reading every draft, funding someone to sit in the room year after year. Your one vote, or your one furious afternoon, is almost never the thing that tips it. So the organised, funded few turn up to every fight, and the angry, busy many cannot. The lobby lives in that gap.
Once a group is that organised, something predictable happens to whoever is meant to keep it honest. Slowly the watchdog starts working for the dog. It is rarely brown envelopes. The minister spends all day talking to the industry, leans on it for the facts, and starts to see the whole question through its eyes. The posh name is regulatory capture, and a Nobel went to the man who described it.
What keeps it oiled is the revolving door. People move from government into industry and back, until both sides are the same faces. Nobody has to be corrupt for this to bend things. The simple prospect of a comfortable job later makes people friendlier now. You have seen it with resources ministers who end up at the gas companies they used to oversee.
A lobby does not need to kill a reform outright. That looks bad and invites a fight. Delay is not a failure for them, it is the weapon. Slow the thing down, send it off for another review, shave bits off until almost nothing is left. You do not lose the argument. You run out the clock.
That is the gambling ad ban exactly. A parliamentary inquiry handed the government a clear plan years ago. It sat in a drawer, came back a watered-down half version the government’s own experts say will not work, and it does not even start until 2027. We know the big television and betting companies kept getting their meetings in Canberra the whole time, because freedom of information requests dragged the records into the open. None of that is a feeling. It is on paper.
The cleverest power of all is quieter still. It is not winning the fight out in the open, it is making sure the fight never reaches the table. The decisions that shape a country most are often the ones that quietly never happen.
A royal commission watered down afterwards is one version. A royal commission never called, because someone powerful does not want the lights switched on, is the better trick, because there is nothing to point at. The banking royal commission is the watered-down kind. After a year of damning evidence, key recommendations were quietly trimmed or reversed once the industry went to work, which the commissioner said he expected. The clearest tell of all: bank share prices went up the day the report came out. The market decided the banks had got off lightly.
Any group that is well organised, well funded and focused on one issue gets the same advantage, and that includes foreign policy. Australia has a well-resourced pro-Israel lobby, including groups such as the Australia, Israel and Jewish Affairs Council and the Zionist Federation of Australia, that presses government hard in exactly the way the gambling industry presses on its own. How a government responds to that pressure is a fair thing to examine.
It is an organised, well-funded operation, not a stand-in for a whole community. Jewish Australians do not all think the same way, and plenty are among the toughest critics of the Israeli government. What I am looking at is organised advocacy and how power responds to it.
If that sounds like a theory, two American researchers put numbers on it. They checked nearly two thousand policy questions against what ordinary people wanted, and against what the wealthy and organised interest groups wanted. What the organised and the wealthy wanted predicted what became law. What the average person wanted made almost no difference on its own. American data, so treat it as American data, but it is the cold-numbers version of everything above.
There is a cheerful counter-theory. It says that with so many groups pushing against each other, no single one ever dominates, and it balances out. The catch is that the groups are not evenly matched. The organised and well-funded turn up to every fight, and the rest of us are the busy, distracted, powerless majority. Whether you think the contest is fair or rigged is the real argument, and you can make up your own mind.
And here is the bitter twist.
The party so many angry, powerless people are turning to, the one that says it stands for the forgotten, is bankrolled by Gina Rinehart, one of the richest and most powerful people in the country. One Nation is not the outsiders’ revolt it sells itself as. It is the best-funded lobby in the land wearing a battler’s hat. The unorganised many, looking for someone to fight the organised few, have been handed a megaphone owned by the organised few.
So where does this leave One Nation? Right back where this piece started. A party can have almost no policies and a fresh embarrassment every week and still keep climbing, because it is not selling policies. It is selling the feeling of being on the side of people who have worked out, correctly, that the system is not built to listen to them. You do not take the wind out of that by being louder, or by borrowing its worst lines. You take it out by changing who gets listened to, by fixing the obvious thing for once, so an ordinary person can point at it and say, look, they heard us.
I have stopped taking the excuses at face value. When something obvious does not get fixed, the easy explanation is that politicians are useless. Sometimes they are. But there is a better question.
Who is making money out of this not being fixed, and who in office is helping them?
Ask it out loud, and ask it often, and by name, and you drag the whole game into the light. One voice is easy to ignore. A few million asking the same question, by name, is the one thing money cannot buy its way past.
Sources
Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action (1965), on why small groups organise and large ones do not
James Q. Wilson, on concentrated benefits and diffuse costs, sometimes called client politics
Anthony Downs, on rational ignorance, why it is sensible for voters not to study everything
George Stigler, The Theory of Economic Regulation (1971), on regulatory capture
E. Schattschneider, The Semisovereign People (1960), and Bachrach and Baratz, on the power to keep issues off the agenda
Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page (2014), Testing Theories of American Politics, the United States study on whose preferences become law
Robert Dahl, on pluralism, the more hopeful counter-view
The Conversation, on the banking royal commission and the industry lobbying to water down its recommendations
Michael West Media and Crikey, on the delayed gambling advertising ban and the freedom of information records of industry meetings
About this post
These notes are put together by Betty in Blacktown, mostly so she and her brother Kevin in Kiama always have something that keeps them thinking it through long after phone call has ended. If it helps you stay in the loop too, even better.
I have watched the commentary around Grace Tame spiral into familiar territory. Some defend her. Some attack her. Some wait for any misstep. The arguments become about slogans, tone, delivery.
Meanwhile, the original political decision sits largely untouched.
Reading through the comments on a right-leaning news site, I came across a thoughtful defence of her right to speak. It reminded me that human rights advocacy does not vanish because someone disagrees with the politics of the moment. Courage is not conditional.
I would have preferred that a particular slogan not be used. It distracted from the substance. Yet focusing only on the slogan misses the larger question.
What was the judgement behind inviting the Israeli president at this time?
Leadership is not only about protocol. It is about reading the room. It is about understanding how divided the public mood already is. It is about recognising when symbolism inflames rather than steadies.
We can debate Grace Tame’s language for days. That is easy. The harder and more necessary question concerns political judgement at the top.
If we are serious about social cohesion, that is where attention belongs.
This is collaborative community advocacy at its best, from Spark Shoalhaven in Politics. It opens with a preface by Cat Holloway and centres the long, sustained work of Peter Allison. His work is seminal. It shows what happens when ordinary people keep records, keep asking questions, and keep going long after institutions move on.
This is about asbestos. It is also about memory, power, and who gets protected.
How many versions of this reckoning do we need before we all stand up, in some way, no matter how small.
First they came for a small place.
Then they came for people without power.
Then they came for something they should never have ignored.
If you live in Shoalhaven, read it.
If you care about how councils work, read it.
If you wonder how systems drift away from accountability, read it.
And if you are part of a group somewhere else, watching something similar unfold, this is an invitation. We are learning that shared stories, shared evidence, and shared pressure travel further together.
Do you feel overwhelmed by the biggest issues shaping everyday life climate disruption, housing pressure, food prices, insurance, government spending? I did too.
For a long time my response lived in my head. Reading more. Arguing better. Feeling frustrated that public debate kept sliding into blame. None of that helped. What shifted things was doing something much simpler. I joined groups. I went to workshops. I put myself in rooms with people who were already translating big problems into practical action.
I have written before about the victim triangle and how easy it is to slip into it when the world feels out of control. What I learned through participation is how people climb out of it. Not by pretending the problems are smaller, and not by blaming others, but by reconnecting with responsibility and control.
One of the clearest examples for me has been Farmers for Climate Action. What works in spaces like this is not ideology. It is community. You learn alongside others. You share uncertainty. You are shown where effort counts. No one is cast as a villain or a victim. People are treated as capable decision makers.
That pattern repeats across other community based organisations like Landcare. Workshops, peer networks, and practical forums all do the same capacity and capability building work. They replace overwhelm with participation. They turn big abstract issues into things you can act on with others.
If public debate feels stuck, it may be because we keep asking people to care without showing them how to act. The way forward is not louder arguments. It is clearer pathways and communities that make engagement feel possible.
That was the circuit breaker for me.
HT to Maryvonne Norman whose excellent Fb post prompted this article
I shared this Kath & Kim meme on Facebook as a reminder. It turned into a sharp little lesson in public disagreements.
It’s doing what satire does best. Pointing at a pattern and trusting people to recognise it. Old ideas come back. The language changes. The instincts don’t.
One response I received took it as a literal claim, as if I were saying these moments in history are the same thing. That reaction lingered longer than the disagreement itself.
Public disagreements often split at a deeper point than the issue being argued.
It made me think about how differently people respond when something presses on identity.
Some people can sit with that pressure. They adjust their view. They accept that history leaves fingerprints on the present. Connections don’t feel dangerous to them.
Others move quickly to shut it down. The first move is separation. These things have nothing to do with each other. End of discussion.
That explanation doesn’t fit what I’m seeing. What feels more relevant is how comfortable people are with revising a view.
Ideas don’t disappear. They travel through history, change names, and slowly get normalised.
If you’re able to admit error, patterns become visible. You expect ideas to repeat, to reappear with better branding, to sound more reasonable the second time around.
People who can revise a view tend to treat history as something you learn from.
If that admission feels too costly, history stays boxed up. Each event stands alone. Calling things “unrelated” keeps the present uncomplicated.
What this exchange clarified for me was that we weren’t arguing about the meme. We were talking past each other. One response was about continuity. The other was about containment.
The difference shows up clearly in conversations like this.
That realisation took the edge off.
It reminded me that people arrive at conversations with different limits, different stakes, and different reasons for holding the line where they do.
How do societies notice patterns early if they refuse to look at where ideas come from?
Often the most telling part is not what someone objects to, but what they refuse to connect.
Cartoon by Roz Chast, published in The New Yorker. Used here for the purpose of commentary and review.
This cartoon by Roz Chast has me frozen at my desk. Elbows planted, fists pressed either side of my mouth, mind ticking over.
A row of lottery balls. Each carries something that holds up on its own. A fraction. A negative. A Roman numeral. Pi. Side by side, they suggest a winning combination. Side by side, they amount to nothing at all.
What I feel first is a sense of helplessness. A reminder that we can only control what is in our control, yet so much feels out of our control. The numbers sit there calmly, as if daring you to argue with them. You cannot. They are correct. They also get you nowhere.
I recognise this feeling. We live inside it.
We gather facts from different places and trust they will cooperate. Data, personal experience, expert opinion, history, instinct. Each comes with its own logic. Each carries weight. Then we stack them together and expect coherence, certainty, reward. When that does not arrive, frustration creeps in.
The digital age feeds this habit. It is a gift. It is also a curse. Access to information feels like power. Volume feels like progress. Speed feels like clarity. What it often delivers is overload. Different systems of meaning collide on the same screen, stripped of context, flattened into equivalence. Everything looks equally convincing. Nothing quite adds up.
The cartoon also speaks to fairness. Even if these numbers were drawn, the system would refuse them. No payout. No recognition. Rules matter. Frameworks matter. Outcomes only count when they are recognised by the structures that govern them. This is uncomfortable to sit with, especially for people who value effort, evidence, and good faith.
I find myself thinking about public debate, policy, community conflict, even family conversations. We argue as though there is a single winning combination. If we explain it better. If we add one more piece of information. If we line things up more neatly. The cartoon suggests something else. Sometimes the issue is not effort or intelligence. Sometimes the pieces belong to different games.
I do not feel smarter after looking at it. I feel more aware of the limits, and of how often I ignore them. There is no win in it. Just recognition.
F
