Andrew Bolt: When did Australia become so soft?
Australia used to be a land where we got on with the job and admired those who kept a stiff upper lip, now the wounded and bleeding are being heralded as heroes. We need to harden up because nobody likes a whinger, writes Andrew Bolt.
Opinion
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Where have all the strong people gone? Why are the hurt and bleeding now our new heroes?
Once we admired people who kept a stiff upper lip. Now we demand they show us their wounds, and we ooh over their bandaged stumps and shattered feelings.
Here are some examples from just yesterday’s papers.
From an interview with Test captain Tim Paine: “Paine has revealed the depths of his mental anguish following a serious injury that left him unable to eat or sleep and embarrassed to leave his home.”
The headline of a story on a star of the AFL women’s competition who was once called fat: “Moana Hope reveals footy fat shame horror.”
The blurb to an interview with Julia Gillard, who became our prime minister but is celebrated for once complaining she was a victim of sexism: “Julia Gillard is amazed her gender speech still resonates.”
Then there was this appeal from Victoria’s Aboriginal Affairs Minister for Aborigines to tell “the truths of our past” – but only the worst “truths” they could think of: “We owe it to Aboriginal Victorians to be frank and honest about the injustices they have faced.”
And in the Sydney Morning Herald, Nick Bhasin, a former SBS culture editor, wept over feeling “weak” and “unvalued and unwelcome” at SBS, as well as “embarrassed and ashamed of my powerlessness”.
See, this American-born man of Puerto Rican and Indian parents was upset SBS didn’t publicly shame an employee who’d told Bhasin that rudeness was part of Indian culture.
These people now speak for a generation that makes a fetish of displaying its hurts and morbid sensitivities. Behold my tears!
University students demand “safe spaces” where they will not hear opinions that challenge them, and “trigger warnings” in case they do.
Mobs tear down statues that offend them, and agitate for the sacking of journalists, academics and writers who speak hard truths.
Do not mistake me. I am all for pity. Pity distinguishes us from beasts and psychopaths. So does kindness.
I am also no enemy of complaining – up to a point. Complaining is one way of getting change and the care you need.
But there must be a balance, surely, between keeping everything bottled inside and showing your pain to get more attention than you deserve.
“Don’t cry,” I was taught as a boy. Nobody like a whinger.
But now they do. How many of the above complaints would once – good or ill – have shamed the complainer?
True, Paine talking about his setback may do someone good, but what’s this “horror” being called fat?
There’s a reason we were once told to “man up “ – the dated sexism of that phrase! – and to treat a body-blow as a scratch.
Life is tough, and if we crumple at each bump we’ll get nowhere.
What good comes from always focusing on our hurts? In trying to gain power by complaining, not creating? In admiring weakness over strength?
Julia Gillard, for instance, would be more empowering if she was like Margaret Thatcher, pointing to what she’d achieved, rather than moaning about some slights – most exaggerated – she imagines she’d suffered.
There’s one more reason to despise all this wound-waving.
Everyone faces challenges, even if some more than others. But now we see even the most privileged and pampered people advertise themselves as broken and insulted.
Take Meghan Markle. She’s a successful actress, rich, celebrated and now living rent-free with husband Prince Harry in a $27 million mansion in Los Angeles.
Compared to the vast majority of humans, Markle has no right to complain. She should not stand in front of cameras, lips quivering as she announces some private hurt. That just trivialises the real pain of the powerless.
Yet Markle, of all people, is now the royal princess of this culture of complaint.
The Greeks and Romans once taught Stoicism as a philosophy, but Markle instead preaches wound-waving: “I really tried to adopt this British sensibility of a stiff upper lip. I tried, I really tried. But I think that what that does internally is probably really damaging.”
Harry is her convert. A former soldier who fought in Afghanistan and flew helicopters there, now babbles instead how he felt “very close to total breakdown on numerous occasions” in his life.
Personally, I liked the old Harry better. But watch crowds of cripples shake their crutches in fury at anyone who says so.
We’re all wounded now! The strong are weak! The weak are really strong!
Oh, really?