Glad to be home!

So my last post said that it was probably gonna be one of two. How right I was! I guess it’s not really psychic ability, more like I know how lazy I am 🙂 In fact, this post wouldn’t have happened at all except that I read an article which reminded me of something that happened and so here it goes…

So as I settle back into my desk in Auckland I see the following link shared on a friend’s Facebook wall.  It detailed how four unsuspecting people, aged from their late 30s to late 60s were set upon by eight people in Bondi. It was allegedly an anti-Semitic attack (allegedly because obviously the rule of law says someone is innocent until proven guilty and these people haven’t been tried in a court of law yet)

There were several things really really sad about this case.

The fact that two of the people who stand accused were SEVENTEEN YEAR OLD BOYS. They will stand trial in youth court, but if found guilty and how young are they to have this sort of thing hanging over them forever! urrgh, young and stupid.

The fact that it is 2013, 68 YEARS after the World War II officially ended, 65 YEARS after we adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the second happening because we didn’t want the first happening ever again! An entire lifetime after all that pain and these things still happen.

The bit that scared me a little bit was that the entire incident started from a verbal confrontation. The reason this scares me was because I was in Sydney last week, and on the first day I was there, the family I was visiting (ethnically Indian) and myself were verbally attacked by a nicely dressed European Australian man on the street. At the time, we put our heads down and kept walking, not wishing to have the incident escalate. I did start a blog post that night which I didn’t post, one that was a bit angrier than this one. The one that said “Why *should* we put our heads down?!” Reading this article now, the obvious answer is, well perhaps to avoid getting attacked in the street.

But I digress.

Racial discrimination cases is something that I am interested in. The racialisation of religion in particular is an issue that I am very interested in. It was just never a personal thing before.