Taking it one crisis at a (troubled) time
ACCORDING to my astrologist it’s three minutes to midnight on Australia’s Doomsday Clock. Life is full of catastrophes – if you’re in front of a computer or television screen it’s nothing but catastrophes – but it’s only after I’ve moved on from reports of Vladimir Putin’s escalating war in Ukraine to reading how Qantas briefly decided to get rid of its domestic flight vegetarian options that I realise the end of world is near.
It’s the Qantas story that really sticks. It makes me want to duck and cover like I’m an extra in one of those 1950s Cold War ads about nuclear attacks. The reporter says the decision will outrage travellers and the resident expert says it’s a “really bad” decision and, as there isn’t an alternative expert saying it’s a really good decision, that’s good enough for me in my hyperventilating state.
One day later and even the requisite Qantas “we listened to our customers” backflip can’t save me from the anti-depressants. Sure, the zucchini and corn fritters are now back on the menu but I’m now being told this was a distressing decision even though distress is an emotion I usually save for The Block when bathroom week goes wrong and Keith has to intervene.
Like everyone else, with my escalating suburban anxiety and medicated good demeanour, I’m the victim here. A patsy in the barrelling cycle of life and the fact that everything, as the media keeps telling me, can only get worse and even if it gets better, will get worse again and that the complimentary zucchini and corn fritter may not always be available, not even in business class.
I blame the media as it’s convenient and goes with the decor, especially if I’m taking a rhetorical position at a dinner party.
I’m reliably told by Kevin Rudd who, depending who you read, is our best and worst prime minister ever, that our media is in an appalling state of disrepair. In fact the worst appalling state of disrepair since the last time it was in an appalling state of disrepair, and I go back to the Don Lane Show and Bert’s Wheel.
Join the queue, Kevin, if you want to get inside my doom-spiralling head. A quick Google between football grand finals tells me that interest rates will “soar”, that our cost-of-living crisis is “out of control”, and our dollar is being “derailed” and this is even before we put an image of a “racist and imperialist” King Charles on it.
There’s the climate catastrophe, the obesity, sugar and red cordial crisis, Covid isolation rule axing disaster, the teal wear-a-mask quandary and what one commentator described in relation to the recent death of Queen Elizabeth, “mourn porn”, as if we haven’t got enough porn to download already.
So, when did your personal apocalypse start for you? Was it when you first moved out of home and your parents put the spare fridge in your bedroom to ensure you never moved back? Or when the lettuce price hit $10. Or maybe it was when television networks decided to run 24/7 coverage of the Queen’s death, which Twitter Angries assure me is the worst media decision ever, even worse than cutting away from Geelong post-match premiership celebrations early to go to the 6pm news.
According to Twitter, the ABC’s decision to send everyone who works for them except Paul Barry to London was a complete suck-up to our homegrown deplorables and proves that the national broadcaster is a right-wing sellout, as if there isn’t enough evidence already, especially on Q&A when they’re discussing climate change, the Voice or making jokes about the Institute of Public Affairs and how it is a threat to democracy because it has opinions.
And don’t get them started on the new Italian Prime Minister, who is apparently returning Italy to a fascist dictatorship.
Maybe, we all need to calm down. Stop hyperventilating and take the advice of the McCain’s “nothing special” advertisement, which notes that at the end of the day, all of us – even our nans – are, well, nothing special and there’s always another Vladimir Putin, Italian election or frozen Hawaiian pizza just around the corner to screw up the day.
Novelist Charles Dickens, who was a white, stale male and therefore innately triggering, famously wrote “it was the best of times. It was the worst of times”.
Let’s face it, delete the first half of that quote, add half a dozen exclamation points, and we wouldn’t want it any other way.