Dear Australia: Stop being a bunch of f**king sooks

WELCOME to Earth in 2017, a world where a Pepsi ad gets people more outraged than the real problems the world faces.

WELCOME to Earth in 2017, a world where university courses need trigger warnings, Hillary Clinton supporters need safe spaces, emergency evacuation centres need transgender toilets and everybody has a right to everything — except of course free speech, because words are violence.

Granted, this doesn’t apply to most of the world, because it’s still got shit like war and poverty and death to worry about.

It only applies to Western civilisation, which is in itself now considered an oppressive colonial construct by the petals who are protected by it.

It has now been seven decades since the last world war and almost every adult in every developed country has equal rights, equal pay and basic access to food and shelter.

In Australia we are probably doing better than any of them, with free health care, free education, a welfare safety net and a democratic government so stable that even after a decade of both major parties completely f***ing it up there still hasn’t been a revolution.

Critical to this has been the incredible advance of technology. We have put so many people on the Moon that one day we just got sick of it and stopped bothering. Then we invented the internet, probably the most revolutionary development in all of human history.

But what do we use it for? To whinge our bloody arses off. To get offended and outraged by anything we can find to offend and outrage us. Oh, and porn.

Kendall Jenner protesting something that nobody can understand but has upset the whole internet.

Consider a story this week in the UK where a bartender saved a hotel guest’s life as he was having a heart attack, only to have the man’s family later complain on TripAdvisor because breakfast wasn’t included.

Or in the US, where social media has deadset sharted itself because a semi-Kardashian made a Pepsi ad featuring a bunch of ethnically diverse models holding corflutes.

Or here in Australia, where an online activist group is vowing to inflict “real pain” on a mild-mannered centrist crossbencher because he agreed to a tax cut for medium-sized businesses.

Seriously, if that’s where the revolution is at we have run out of real problems.

The irony, of course, is that there are still a lot of real problems to get outraged about. It’s just that they never seem to be the ones to attract the outrage.

I can’t remember the last time I saw a protest march against terrorism or a trending hashtag about homelessness yet as soon as some poor sod says the wrong thing on Q&A their name explodes onto the internet like a dose of salts. And half the time it’s spelt wrong.

This is the “Outrage Tardis”. We have just as much anger as we’ve always had but less and less to get angry about. As a result we have to squeeze all our outrage into ever more extreme and diminishing problems, whereupon it becomes more and more hysterical and ridiculous.

For example it recently emerged that IBM Australia was one of many major companies to actively endorse same-sex marriage. Great! So do I!

Yet instead of welcoming this, activists simply turned on the fact IBM happened to employ one Christian executive who didn’t. Presumably if IBM had sacked him they would then protest the fact he was still alive — although even dying didn’t save Bill Leak from their wrath.

Nothing, it seems, is ever enough. It’s not progress they want, just protest.

A Twitter activist protests against IBM employing a Christian staffer.

We know this because the complaints get louder and louder and more and more specific even though the world has never been more progressive — especially in the West, which is the part the activists hate the most.

Yes, there is still poverty and violence and oppression but the fact is that for most people life is simply not that bad and, certainly as far as tolerance and equality is concerned, it’s getting better and better. Society’s only fault, it seems, is that it isn’t perfect.

In fact this is the massive disconnect between the radical left and the retrograde right. Revolutionary ideologues imagine their theoretical utopia and then get upset when the real world falls short of it. Meanwhile arch conservatives pine for a golden age that for many people felt more like a golden shower.

The truth is that if you are lucky enough to live in the West, right here, right now is probably the best time in history to be alive. Want proof? Let’s take a walk down memory lane.

Just to make it fair, let’s ignore the caveman days, human sacrifices in Mesopotamia, the dark ages and the bubonic plague. Let’s just take the last 100 years.

Exactly one century ago World War I hadn’t even ended. By the following year it would have claimed 16 million lives, including seven million civilians and nine million combatants slaughtered on such an industrial scale it was referred to as “the meat grinder”. It was supposed to be the war to end all wars. It wasn’t.

Think life’s tough now? Here are some Australians in the trenches during World War I.

Then, as the world was still reeling from the loss, it was hit by the so-called Spanish flu which killed three times as many people again — an estimated 50 million deaths. Up to one third of the world’s population was infected.

A decade later, in 1929, the global stockmarket crashed, plunging the world into the Great Depression. In the 1930s the unemployment rate in Australia hit almost 32 per cent. It’s currently 5.9 per cent, in case you were wondering.

Everyone thought this was pretty much as bad as it could get. Little did they know a certain politician was building up quite the following in Germany.

World War II broke out at the end of that decade. It ended up killing between 50 and 80 million people, the deadliest conflict in human history. This of course included the mass genocide of some six million Jews — including 1.5 million children. Whole cities were incinerated.

But if that’s too easy let’s skip ahead to the 1950s, the idyllic age of yore for so many. Surely things were better then, right?

Well, let me just motor through the rest:

The 1950s was a particularly oppressive era for young men in leather jackets, as this recently unearthed photograph shows.

1950s

Pros:

Elvis

Cons:

Constant threat of nuclear war

White Australia policy

Women stuck at home with oversized whitegoods

The 1960s had the Beatles and also racism.

1960s

Pros:

The Beatles

Cons:

Constant threat of nuclear war

White Australia policy

Women stuck at home with oversized hairdos

The 1970s had Sherbet but unfortunately homosexuality was against the law. Picture: Lewis Morley

1970s

Pros:

Sherbet

Cons:

Homosexuality illegal

Remember South Africa in the 1980s? It was not good. Picture: AFP

1980s

Pros:

Wham!

Cons:

Apartheid

Even these guys couldn’t stop the 1990s being the best decade ever.

1990s

Pros:

Nirvana

Cons:

Nickelback

OK, who am I kidding. The 1990s were pretty much the perfect decade — the world had all the technology it needed to function but not quite enough to 3D-print handguns or give every last hand-jammer a platform on which to complain how much they’d been violated.

Instead we used to do that by marching to Parliament House every second Wednesday, which was just as pointless but at least annoyed far fewer people.

Of course the funny thing is that the world is still potentially on the brink of nuclear war, but nobody’s out in the streets protesting against Iran or North Korea. They’re all crying into their iPhones because some red-headed reality TV star was so stupid he managed to win a US election.

Anyway, it doesn’t matter because China’s going to take over the world in about 10 years and crying will no doubt be banned as a sign of bourgeois Western decadence. So at least some good will come out of it.

In the meantime, can every overindulged oversensitive sookerati please stop whining about every single thing that upsets them in their overprivileged lives?

Thanks very much for that and a big “Ni hao!” to our future masters.