Why Is “Tough Love” Only Meted Out To The Powerless?
Yahoo news has a pretty awful story about Australia’s effort to “heal Aboriginal woes” with “tough love”.
There is apparently debate whether this approach – which, for instance, makes alcohol illegal in some towns, but only for Aborigines; in those same towns, many whites are allowed to drink in their homes – they wonder is it racist or is it the needed prescription for things like the endemic poverty, joblessness, drug and alcohol use, reports of abuse of women and child sexual assault and the author of the article wonders -
So is tough love enough? Or is it doomed, like past approaches, to fail — condemning Aborigines to a third-world life in a first-world nation?
An Australian acquaintance once told me, years ago, that “it was not the Europeans who have had trouble adjusting in Australia; it’s the Aborigines who had the trouble adjusting”. Apparently without irony or regard for the history of the European presence in Australia and the devastating effect it had on the inhabitants of the continent as they had trouble “adjusting” to having their lands stolen, their children stolen, their lives broken and being designated as part of the “flora and fauna” of the country until the 1970s and so on.
I can’t imagine why one doesn’t just bounce back from that.
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