| The High Cost of Low Expectations |
Was it Einstein who said - the answers to the woes of the world, will not come from the very systems and people that created the problems in the first place?
Brindle Style Artists & Musicians Forum went out in print originally. Anyone with something to say was offered a platform.
Thus the subject index that remains today. Cairns community musos & artists had lots to say. The Murri Grapevine was notoriously reliable and well-informed. The working /drinking class had many a fine armchair philosopher, political commentator and amateur economist.
The goal: collate and honour the voice and face of invisible (non-commercial) community.
Oh and did I forget Hippies - how remiss. Early 2nd wave colonialism in Northern Australia was very much about alternatives to urbanism and economic rationalist values although the term itself was yet to come into being. Anyone with no agenda and no status within mainstream dictates of the bought and paid for dinosaur media was represented here About Us Voluntary Simplicity
Maiia (editor) MAY - 2012 Time to update the editorial tradition which was by passed in the last 5 years rebuild of this website and incorporation of facebook into the proces. The word on the street may actually be less tangible. The internet is a public voice but there is an overabundance of opinion, repetition, hearsay and rhetoric. Not to mention tricky trickers of disinformation - deliberate bullshitters. With the wisdom of experience I was able to read straight through verbal data, when we were NOT ANONYMOUS but accountable to one another.
There is a problem where people assuming positions of power or authority lack faith & foresight. A problem when small-minds undermine community potential for Self Determination
"Innovators 2.5% – These are the ground-breakers, the risk-takers, the creative thinkers and entrepreneurs whom by nature are designed to change the world."
The High Cost of Low Expectations - is a phrase I picked up from Jason Marsalis - originally referring to how B.E.T - Black Entertainment Television was bought out and ruined - that is so like Cairns. Branford Marsalis
"In 1991, B.E.T was the first black-controlled company on the New York Stock Exchange. In 2003, it was no longer a black owned business when it was bought by media conglomerate Viacom for $3 billion." wikipedia
Aug'09 Maiia "Recently I was asking about an academic program offered by one of the local high-schools The reply from a teacher at a different school was that her students are "not academic" and this has perturbed and disturbed me ever since.
"Why don't you get some grammar *%^% you!"
Maiia Well back when I was a girl, back when white enough "to pass" was still not good enough. Back when people of mixed heritage were eyed with suspicion, as though a spear chuckin' native might materialise at any moment- at best we were a curiosity, could they be intelligent? Civilised? Assimilated? The European teachers looked at us raggle taggle mob with no shoes, no lunch and snot noses - no they'll never need grammar- they'll be flat out reading and writing at all! Hence the recognition of how a lack of visionary thought and poor outcomes are very much related.
The High Cost of Low Expectations and The Low Cost of High Standards 2012
Maiia The 1970s may be history, and the collective prejudice of the period may have died with it's perpetrators... but something still lingers... something elusive. I must say it is equally fun meeting the same type of prejudice as a woman, the same assumption, this time based on a gender bias, automatic dismissal - based on collective ignorance. Based on low expectations, based on a lack of visionary thinking.
What I'm trying to get a grasp of here is the unrecognised waste that occurs where the perceived value and potential of people is measured superficially or prejudicially. "Innovators 2.5% - the ground-breakers, risk-takers, creative thinkers and entrepreneurs whom by nature are designed to change the world." Maiia: This pattern neatly fits my 30 years of observations about Australians across all sectors of class, race, gender, socio-economic and population background... The 1% for example who think the role of Murris is to fill prisons, be given 'jobs' by companies who want to exploit the land for mineral resources, or join the army and fight for... God knows what/who? Then there's the immigrant working-class who were all good for breaking rocks in the hot sun and don't have any protective structures at all, interesting too how the political right facing social justice issues uses the term sovreignty
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