We’re all weirdos!

As humans we operate on so many different wavelengths. One of our great strengths, which is perhaps also one of our great weaknesses, is that we’re all so different.

It is what makes us, as a mob, both highly adaptable and highly vulnerable and ultimately the quintessential success story of the Animal Kingdom.

Some of us are reminded every day of how different we all are, what pushes our buttons, what makes us tick, what motivates us and what captures our interest – often based on simple but personal sensibility.

What might seem an obvious area of interest to one might attract everything from ambivalence, mirth or confusion to scorn from others.

Some of us are weirdo.

You know, the one who makes a big deal of knowing the Latin names of plants and animals and wonders why others don’t, the motor head who won’t rest until they see their reflection in the chrome on their guilty of being that hubcaps, the nutcase angler who obsesses about ‘the big one’. And so on and so on!

The truth is that we are so different from each other that this difference, instead of creating divisions, can act like a magnetic lure and draw people closer together in healthy solidarity.

When this happens, previously unseen possibilities suddenly become obvious and the world, as the old saying goes, becomes our oyster.

For whatever reason, we’ve forever raged against this machine and at times reverted back to a chicken-coop mentality and attacked the curious minority or individual. History bluntly tells us that this has never worked.

In the Wimmera, one of the most curious descriptions of people in the region is ‘conservative’, which for me at least has always been misnomer.

Political agendas tell us we live in a conservative heartland. If that means we’re part of collective society protecting ideals based on progress, security and stability, then fair enough.

But if it means being unmoving, lacking imagination, insular, and critically, protective of the boring norm, I haven’t seen it my lifetime.

In fact, most people I’ve known, perhaps stimulated by boredom, have all been more than slightly edgy in what they do and how they think. Yes, that means you and me – we’re all weirdos!

And in a political contradiction some of us stick out like sore thumbs in the endless sea of ‘sensible’ black clothing that proliferates the streets of metropolitan Melbourne – the supposed home of the non-conservative.

To use a good old Australian idiom, it might be time for all of us to have a good hard look at ourselves.