In which I discovered that there are good people in the world

Of course, the title is slightly exaggerated. I'm not stupid, but I'm also not one of those intellectual, "humanity is doomed; the earth is in danger because humans are by nature greedy and selfish and evil" kind of people, because I know that there are good people, who will do things I could not even imagine doing. Do I necessarily count myself as one of those people? Eh, I try to, I think we all do, but in reality, I sometimes struggle with the whole "good person" tag. However, I'd like to reach back to an entry I wrote a little while back in response to an anti-Semitic article in the local magazine. It was an article that filled me, as someone considered to be a part of a minority - and even simply as a human being - with anger at the complete lack of consideration and awareness of other cultures in this modern "multicultural Australia".

I'd like to mention that I am not an avid reader of the Beast (the magazine in which the original article was found); it can be trashy, but on occasion I do find articles of interest or entertainment when I have nothing else to read. When the original article was published, I was sick, and I was going through a period of being extremely reactive to anything that offended me in the slightest. This article succeeded in ruining my day, and for a while, my faith that we were making progress in the terms of acceptance of religion and different cultures. The author, Duncan Horscroft, is probably a lovely guy, but when an author, do you really want an article that has such thinly veiled (possibly unintentional) racism in it? For a while, I actually toyed with editing my response and sending it into the magazine, but by then we had thrown it away and I didn't have the address and the by and by is that regrettably, I wasn't able to have a word in an issue very close to my heart. I thought that was the end of this issue being discussed, however luckily, it was not.

I don't know who Brett Chester is, but I'd like to personally thank him for the letter he wrote into the Beast, which was selected as the Letter of the Month for the October 2010 issue. He didn't have the same open-ended forum as I opted to vent on, but his response actually went and did something (an area in which I have often had trouble) - I sincerely hope that everyone who read the original article and used that as the only means to form their opinion on the issue reads his response and takes on the points he has made, which I would argue are more valid and even far more neutral than the original article. What the article initially failed at was keeping both sides of the story in equal consideration - religious necessities were pushed aside to make way for the views from some expensive house - and while I am not saying the points raised in Horscroft's article are wrong, or even necessarily unimportant,  I would have liked to have seen an article that entertained both points of view and perhaps did not have such a blatant bias in a way which I feel expressed nothing but a level of ignorance and intolerance.

Chester made a lot of good points, which I won't go into (several points were ones that I tried to make, but failed, because I got quite caught up in the anti-Semitic bias of the subject matter alone, rather than simply the way the author handled it inappropriately). He caught the caption to the picture, which I had not even noticed, and cleverly commented on the soundness of the points raised towards the end of the article. None of this is what really matters, though - I think the most important thing is that the original article was not left as the be all and end all of the issue. I am actually relieved that someone else got to fight back, to voice their opinions on the issue, and did it so eloquently and efficiently (in a way that I wish I could do, but I'm too much of a rambler).

So good on him, and I'd like to see more active responses next time something offensive to you comes up - as a Jewish girl, I'm going to fight forever to have racism gone, as well as from the media (along with other things), but I don't hold any power by myself. My issues lie solely in the fact that surely everyone deserves the right to lead their life the way they have decided to, and to do this without critical judgement from people with no authority on the subject, and I think this is a statement that can be widely agreed with. I want to see more stands taken because everyone has a right to an opinion, and these opinions should be voiced alongside others. There are people who will take action, and that's a great thing. I might be lazy, I might never actually get around to do anything, but I'm not going to stop voicing my thoughts when I see something suss going on, and as long as there are other people doing that as well, then I'm reasonably proud to be part of this society instead of ashamed that articles like the original one are what is accepted as fact.

(Sidenote: a lot of good people do things through other means. If you're a good person, go on doing that, however you choose to)
(Sidenote two: I actually think we are all inherently good and bad. I'm not going to go on and on about my "are we good people?" opinion because, trust me, I've had that conversation before and it takes hours)
(Sidenote three: Apologies for my rambling, several sidenotes and occasionally fading away from the topic - sometimes I just write and don't actually realise what I'm doing.)

(Sidenote four: sorry about the infrequent posting, I've been busy and I've gone through a lapse in ever actually having anything to say. Which is out of character.)