You may have had a good year, and if that’s the case then good on you, I hope 2024 is even better.

For the rest of us though, 2023 has been a year where we have witnessed a schism in our society here and the cheapening of life abroad.

The lives of our fellow human beings has become cheaper. The ordinance used to extinguish life keeps getting dearer and profitable, it’s why perpetual war is now common. We live at a time where some life is seen as less valid than others, and world leaders through their inaction, give their seal of approval to this monstrous approach to humanity by war criminals and terrorists that will never be punished for their atrocities because our leasers let them go unpunished.

Australia, despite daring to rebel against our closest ally -  first by calling on humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza at the United Nations and then having the temerity to say no to a US request to send a warship to the Red Sea to protect international shipping lanes, has now become a client state for America’s military-industrial complex. Make no mistake, we are all in both militarily and on foreign policy and with a US election in the new year and the prospect of a second Trump Presidency, we may find all of our geo-strategic eggs in the basket of a basket case.

 Around the world citizens have never felt less empowered even thought the world itself seems to be shrinking. Our shrunken globe mean conflicts and ethnic cleansing driven by the paranoia of maddened men on the other side of this orb impact how much it will cost some of us to have some “family time” as the price of food and fuel skyrocket. The economic divide becoming deeper.

Some of us will sip champagne and feast on seafood tonight, others will eat cereal hoping the milk lasts until next pay.

Let’s not label it a cost-of-living crises, let’s call it what it is – poverty and the gap between the haves and have nots is widening.

More and more of us are finding ourselves impoverished through no fault of their own. The dream we were sold about capitalism and the chance to climb the social and economic ladder has proven one of the most effective lies in human history. Capitalism has been gamified to such an extent that there are now entire generations that will not know wealth or ownership in their lifetimes.

This powerlessness, sensed and real, mean some amongst us look to radical alternatives at self-declared demagogues standing at podiums offering solutions to people’s torment, while offering themselves the world in return. So much of the global population will be voting in elections in 2024 where tyrants stand in plain sight on the ballot paper, and because things can’t continue on the way they are, some may choose to step away from democracy and flirt with tyranny. History is fool of such instances.

Some of the world’s greatest oppressors have been elected by the people.

At home a simple proposition from First Nations people was trounced at the referendum. The politics of division has proven itself effective yet again.

Australian politics in 2023 reached the Trumpian heights of bullshit and misdirection will no doubt be deployed when it next comes to our time to vote. The tools of division work here because the apathy within the Australian electorate means peoples are less than interested in true history, the “birth certificate of the nation” and correcting course on the treatment of the First Peoples of this land. Instead, far more fixated by Marriage at First Sight and Love Island than incarceration rates and deaths in custody.

Paradoxically, it is the apathy that is so rooted now in the Australian psyche, that will prevent the broader community from tearing itself apart over the horrors in the middle-east or anywhere else.

So much has played out in 2023, and our challenge is now whether we learn from the horridness of this year, or whether we allow it to ingrain itself as the new norm. I remain optimistic that we can learn, but my optimism has never been more tested than it has now. 

May your optimism be validated.

Have a safe and happy 2024, we’re going to need each other now more than ever.

DJ x