Day 36 - September 4th

Day 36 - September 4th
First silly day in Melbourne
furrrrken DRUNK ¡uh!
Don't know how to spell a banana, I could pick one out of a line-up but that's about it...

        Sigh... okay.

        Moving to Melbourne was a huge adjustment for me. At 21 I still didn't really know how to live independently and look after myself, and I was also still stuck in a fairly selfish mindset, having grown up in the sheltered bubble of Adelaide. A few years later when I moved to London I remember walking around and being taken aback by the number of people of all different races speaking all different languages that I'd see just walking around the street. It made me realise the lie that is Australian Multiculturalism. We like to think of ourselves as this diverse and integrated culture, but while London is as close as I've experienced to actually diverse and integrated, Australian Multiculturalism basically amounts to, “Look! There, see?! We've got one! Look, how multicutural!”
        Growing up in Adelaide I was especially sheltered to the effects of racism/prejudice etc. I went to a fantastic private school in Adelaide, and in a year of 168 kids, there was one black kid. His nickname was Black Man. Insanity.
        When I was 19 I moved into a house with some friends for six months and on the first day we lived there we found a litter of kittens, one of which we kept. We couldn't think of a name for him for a long time, so I just started calling him a name I thought was funny, which ended up sticking and becoming his actual name until he was sadly run over by a car and unceremoniously 'buried' by our douchebag housemate, Josh, in a wheelie bin. That name was Faggot.... I mean, fuck.
        When I was 18, riding around in cars with loud, drunken mates, I would yell in excitement, to no one in particular, “NIGGAS IN THE CRIB!!” – in my mind, that's what we were. In my mind it was fine, because I wasn't trying to hurt anyone. I just didn't understand.

        So obviously the reason I'm writing all of this is because on the card for Day 36 I've blacked out the Queen's face with my pen, and next to her I've written the word, 'COON'. And that's not really cool, is it. It's not great, in fact it sucks, and I'm really very ashamed of it.
        Even at the time I would have known it wasn't great. I would have been scribbling on her face out of absent-minded boredom, and then seeing what I'd created, decided to label it as such, with a naughty word. It's like when someone says, “Don't push the Big Red Button.” I don't know what kind of person you are, but unless I'm given a very good reason to go along with it, all I want to do after you've said that is push the Big Red Button.
        And of course in this case there is a reason not to do it – loads, actually – but as far as my self-centred world view was concerned it didn't really matter. At 20 years old I barely knew anyone who wasn't white and straight, and the few people I did know who didn't fit into those two categories, I didn't know very well. As far as I could tell, my actions had no consequences – I couldn't see an obvious victim, so I imagined that there was none. I was just saying silly things that people told me not to say, because they told me not to say them. People had explained why they were bad (other straight, white people, because that's all there really were), but I couldn't see the consequences right in front of my eyes, so to me, those reasons were just theoretical.
        That's all this kind of juvenile racism was to me until I met people in my life who it had actually effected, and realised the real damage validating those kinds of attitudes does to us as a society. And the damage it does to actual, human people.

        So I guess what I'm trying to say is I'm sorry for the ignorant person I was at 21. I try to listen and be better, and there's always more I can do. I'm honestly terrified of writing this and putting it out into the world. I'm scared of what people might think of me, maybe they'll think I'm hiding something, or condemn me for my past mistakes. I wish I could just take this card out of the deck, but I can't, because you'd know, and then you'd ask why. I could replace it, find a deck and write myself a new card, without the scribbling, but then I'd know. The whole point of this thing is it's supposed to be honest, so I might as well own up to it. This is who I was, hopefully it's not who I am now.

Click here to read the next part - Day 37 - September 13th