Its 48 hours out and the world for Schapelle Leigh Corby is about to change drastically, again.
Bali Indonesia hosted her, Kerobokan gaol was her Island prison home, Villa Kuta became her release sanctuary.  

Viewpoints on Corby and about her innocence or guilt have always been deeply divided, painfully polarised.  As her deportation from the only ‘stable place’ she has known, post-holiday paradise time, winds rapidly down, the divide will erupt again.

What is it about her that engenders such venom and passion is also painfully obvious.  It’s her looks.

How she looked as the years went by and how she looked at what had become of her existence has been fully exploited and fed fat on.  By an industry dedicated to raping the untold inexpressible inner world of human suffering and degradation.

What is left of Schapelle Leigh Corby, human being, label, commodity, is only for her to really know.  She in all likelihood has no clue as to whom and what she is anymore.  The only probable surety is that she doesn’t want any more of what has been.  She is probably terrified and petrified of what is to come.

The reverse culture shock that she will go through, as she touches down on ‘home turf’, could in all likelihood be more damaging than the hell that awaited her, when she became locked up in paradise.  In a bizarre Stockholm Syndrome paradigm, she would have become uncomfortably comfortable in and with her captors.  Fluent in Bahasa Indonesia, culturally desensitized, filled to the brim with whatever energy she has absorbed from the Island of The Gods.

​On an Island that lives and breathes Karmic consequence, she has fully served her sentence and squared the ledger.  Or has she?

Schapelle Leigh Corby did the crime and she did the time, that’s it.  For those who still want her punishment to continue.  You can be rest assured that it will.  In a foreign country, where she is a stranger, where there is nowhere to hide on a big brown land.  For those who believe she was innocent, she is certainly innocent no more, that was lost for her a very long time and many lifetimes ago.

Schapelle Leigh Corby deserves peace, especially of mind.  It is highly doubtful she will ever feel that state or have that luxury ever again.  Control for her was removed.  Her forced removal from her Island home is just the latest punishment facing and forcing her down, again.

​It really is time to leave her alone to deal with the demons of her past present and rapidly approaching frightening future.

Image Credit.   Getty Images  

There’s the selfish exuberance of youth, the selfish survival of parenthood and finally the selfish irrelevance of impending death.  Is it selfish?  Yes.  Not in a negative emotional way, more simply abject survival in a stage of existence. 

There are few things more sobering than being an observer of an ocean when you’re totally soaking in it.  Riding waves plunging depths surfacing breathlessly for air.  Being Bombay battered attempting to cross a full raging Indian road with a full accompaniment of suffocating full on surroundings.  Sound smell energy.  All while on hands and knees with Vaseline smeared goggles.  That scenario comes sobbingly close.

It’s all about survival of self, for self, about self.  It’s only at those moments when the self really realizes exactly where it is.  Is totally aware of the full picture, size of ocean, Mumbai expanded madness, its place in all, past present future.  That’s when it hits and you’re always a Nano second behind the impact, grasping to catch up, to hold on.

The Human condition is such a blessing and curse, awareness of so much, fear of so much more.  Watching while being deeply involved and immersed is the real trip of life.  It only comes if one is fortunate to have progressed through the stages.  Lived a past, reached a present, careering to a future.  With goggles off, no way back.  You’re crawling stumbling.  You’re going to that other side, that’s it.

Watching 3 generations in those stages from a 4 generation positional viewpoint is a mind fart.  The youthful past memories still intact, parental realities fully recent, impending ageing and death a growing frown on the horizon.

There’s really nothing selfish about the stages in negative terms.  It’s a journey of self-awareness.  That awareness must start with self and knowledge of self. 

If you have played your part and been fortunate to have fully lived and loved through stages 1 & 2, If you can keep your head and heart through stage 3, really knowing you have truly lived and loved, then it’s time to leave.

​It’s time to drop the mic.  Exit stage left.

Image credit.  http://starecat.com
  

Rules are rules.  Eye contact is an important part of human communication, widows to the soul and all that.  Culturally speaking there are human societies where looking at each other eye ball to eye ball is a no-no, from their viewpoint. 

Most eye contact avoidance issues are people driven customs, derive from historically grounded events and are due to their forebears undergoing abusive suffering by dominant overseers.  To be seen not heard and most definitely to be not looking directly at superior me in the eye, type of rules.  No problem at all with such customized rulings, especially in the homes of those unfamiliar foreign cultured people, with whom one is not familiar with.

However, there are places that end up espousing cultural norms, when in fact the majority of people living there are definitely not of that culturally shaped background.  Places that are in fact only shaped by the theoretical majority mindset of people who live there.  An adoption of a way of life that isn’t of your cultural background, is usually either an ability to be open and receptive to other ways of thinking leading therefore to being, or a sure sign of latching onto a way of being through insecurity fear and sheep following mentality.

The human world revolves on fascinating cultural habits.  From the weird and wonderful to strange and endearing, it’s what keeps us interested interesting and ultimately selfishly destructive.  The huge array of nation by nation customs, keep us grounded in myth merriment and madness.  Making sense of a chaotic world takes dedication to foibles and traditions.  It’s customary in most custom driven countries to screw up, when it comes to putting your foot in habits that you have no previous knowledge of.  Getting killed for causing offence is rare, although when customs are blended in law, outcomes can be dire indeed.  Thankfully and usually, levels that carry lethal implication are well advertised and brought to your attention in many various ways.  Customs cultures and habits really are what bind people.   They also pit them against each other.

So when it comes to the ‘what are you looking at, you looking at me’ aggressive type statements, it’s a part of the reaction to a culture.  A culture that expects if you’re physically in that environment you should know the rule(s).  The only problem with the rule, resulting from the culture embedded in the environment, is the fact that it’s not advertised.

The base banal rule that direct eye contact sends a message that you want to fight or fuck is hysterical, if it weren’t so serious in regard to its reality.  Hysterical in action, how do you know if I’m looking at you unless you’re looking at me and who does the rule apply to, looker or lookee.  Serious in outcome, rules must have consequences.

What is left out, apart from notices at airport entry and large printed billboard signage, is a most obvious question.  What does it take to fight and fuck at the same time?

Guess that would denote a brand new unspoken rule to add to a culture that already has enough domestic violence locked and loaded right in.

Image credit.  http://www.deviantart.com/tag/jthmnnyjohnny     
      

“We acknowledge the Larrakia people as the Traditional Owners of the Darwin region and pay our respects to Larrakia elders past and present. We are committed to a positive future for the Aboriginal community.”

The unique thing about being in a place where unique issues are literally up front and portrayed as just part of the Territory is the fact that the not so unique issue about color is really very simply black and white.

Maybe a by-product of having lived in and traveled on many different places is a keen objective awareness of surroundings and the feel of a place.  Maybe it’s just a survival instinct developed when one is not in a familiar comfort zone.  Maybe it’s just eyes ears and senses open to what is actually happening right there and right then.  Maybe if you don’t know any different or don’t really care maybe then you don’t see hear and feel.  Or maybe you’re just unable to put yourself, imagine yourself, in another’s position.  Stereotypical viewpoints can be based in ignorance and fear. Awareness and fear of what has been brewing for generations certainly cannot be ignored, anymore.

Darwin City is certainly at the Top of Australia, but for many it’s where they end up, bottoming out.  Homelessness and destitution is not unique.  But in the Northern Territory it’s almost triple the National rate.  It’s just another ugly award to hang on a wall of records dedicated to the downside of unspoken ills affecting this part of the world.

In this City it’s very common to witness Indigenous individuals and groups in various stages of distress destitution and chemical intoxication.  It’s accepted as normal.  Behaviors that would be unacceptable elsewhere are normalized here.  In a City that appears to have no solution to the most unique of all unique issues, a divided we and they understanding between black and white is a shared common bond.     

After an extended period of time I can now see how convenient blindness creeps in.  Like macular degeneration, a full sensory glaucoma can set in easily; crossing the road to avoid the issues is preferable.  There is no reconciliation; they are just political statements.  Words spat and rattled out for votes and future self-serving lucrative pensions.

But, nothing comes close to cementing the divide brick by brick more evidently than the sight and sound of a group of Aboriginal men and women being moved on from a predominantly whites only drinking establishment.  It’s nothing new on Darwin’s famous mile long alcohol soaked Mitchell Street.  But this time it’s just that little bit more clearly heard.  They are seated engaged in employing their click sticks hoping for some meagre monetary gain as a security employee approaches.  “All of this belongs to us and you will need to move on.”  

​As a white man I am ashamed that racism segregation discrimination and fourth world conditions are very real and apparent in this first world ‘Lucky Country’.
 
I don’t have answers and am not totally innocent when it comes to issues of color. I fear and at times suspect that the damage done is too much, remembering that the impact on this Nations first peoples is so recent in generational terms.

‘There has never been a more exciting time to be an Australian,’ spoken by a privileged white man in power.”

In a world of tipping points, maybe things need to get worse, before they get better, maybe.

​Image credit.  News.com.au