In January of 2001, I attended my first and only Big Day Out. I have no recollection of the context of this event in relation to that it occurred on Australia Day. I know that this day has always been celebrated - there are fireworks, and parties, and a public holiday, and so forth. But we also have parties and holidays for the Queen's birthday, and I don't think we particularly care beyond the fact that there's a holiday and parties to attend. Australia Day has never meant anything to me, I must confess. And even though I'm not suggesting it has never meant anything for a single other person, it certainly never meant a great deal to most young people. It meant a day off, and a party, and that was about as far as it went. I never saw a single flag at the Big Day Out; I didn't hear a single conversation about race, or national pride, or any of the topics that have now become a larger part of our rhetoric. In 2001, I saw some bands and got wasted. That was pretty much it.

 

Seven months later, I decided to leave Sydney, and return to my hometown. I had grown disillusioned with my life, and so too, the society I now lived in. I got to a point in my life where I couldn't shake the emptiness. We were all so empty. And we longed to fill that emptiness with a meaning, but we reached for the very things that left us feeling so incomplete. I didn't know what I was going to fill that void with, exactly; all I knew was that Sydney - the city I looked up to so much as a young boy enduring a country adolescence - no longer offered it. At very least, I recognised that I was too caught up in the wrong direction to ever be able to find another way, while I was there. I decided to leave, to isolate myself in the place where it pretty much all began for me. Somewhere along the way, I made a wrong turn. I had to go back to the beginning and find some other path. I don't think I was that different from most people, truth be told; I simply recognised it, and endeavoured to address it. Everybody assured me I was successfully "going places" - I had many boxes checked on that vacuous checklist we have in this society. Surely, I was happy. But I wasn't. And I'd seen beneath too many others to realise that beneath the checklist, they weren't particularly happy, either. Whether it's a house and a nice car, a marriage and kids, or whether you're beautiful, or rich, or whatever it is, these things, if we place all our focus on them and value them simply as concepts that must be obtained to warrant self-worth, will rob us in the end. By the turn of the century, we were pretty much cradled by an illusion. Something had to give. And it was about to, in a way very few of us could have imagined.

 

I spent the last three months in Sydney, house-minding a cottage in Balmain East (beside that most beautiful of harbours) that belonged to an academic who had supported my exit and recognised it as a moment of strength (when I knew very well that most were gossiping that I was running away from a "burn out"). It had rained the whole time - that gorgeous, sombre spring sleet-rain that couldn't have created a better setting for my wild (somewhat tumultuous, but highly entertaining) life as a young city kid to come to an end. It ended - aptly, and with great relief - in a warm, quiet, gentle haze, as if the spring had given us one last moment of peace before the harsh Aussie summer brought with it an inevitable change.

 

And there, I sat amid towers of boxes: a coffee in one hand, a cigarette in the other. And though, later, I would write a great deal about this time in my life; while it was happening, I wrote not a single word. I spent several months simply hanging in a feeling that never manifested into any concrete articulation - no verse, no music, no poetry, no earth-shattering theories. All I knew was that things had come to an end. I sat, with the rain covering the city outside my window in a deceptively beautiful sheen, suspended in an ending - perhaps, with a soapie on the television I wasn't really watching, or some opera on the stereo I wasn't really listening to. I sat my ending out in that tired calm that befalls one who stops struggling and submits to a direction, waiting patiently for the technicalities of my life (for one cannot simply get up and leave a place - there are new leases, and moving vans, and all sorts of tiresome things to arrange) to catch up with the psychological. I saw it not so much as a calm before the storm (because I hoped the storm clouds were finally going to drift from my narrative), but more one that followed it. But, even so - oh, what a storm was coming.

I spent the final evening with an old lover of mine, Henry. I didn't really want to be spending the final moments in Sydney with one of my fallen little angels (his little wings almost perfectly in proportion to his little horns) - yet another lost bohemian-come-speed-addict, who had run to Darlinghurst from the pain of his adolescence in whatever little country town it was - but perhaps, it was fitting. I was leaving this jungle, and nothing could stop me - what did it matter if I endured the poisoned slither of one more serpent? He talked all evening over the food, wine and coffee I'd (as always) provided, which came to something that was of no surprise: he had nowhere to stay for the night. I supposed that meant I was to make a space in my bed. As usual, it did. He smiled his deceptively beautiful smile, and threw his arms around me, assuring me that he loved me, and that I was the only one who was ever there for him, and that one day, he'd pay me back for everything (an empty promise I'd long stopped believing in). No problem, Henry. Don't mention it, Henry. And hey, you were sleeping with me (as sensually and mechanically challenged as this act is with someone who shot up crystal meth, nine times a day). That's how it works, isn't it?

Before bed, we walked down to the harbour, and lit up a joint for the usual faux-poignant fluff of two young artistes getting stoned in a picturesque setting. But I'll always remember this conversation - not because it yielded anything I'd never particularly said or heard before, but because in hindsight, it would be impossible to ignore the symbolism of the irony. Henry talked of how the great, modern West had fallen under a spell, hypnotised by a consumerism they didn't realise was actually enabling the power held over them by the rich men who were destroying them.

 

This was something he talked of, often. Henry was, in a manner, what many would call the "downtrodden". At very least, he was someone who had lost the game: a speed addict on welfare, living on the couches and beds of the people he had been able to elicit sympathy or arousal from, justifying it all by passing himself of as an "artist" (oh, but aren't we all, in the ghettos of East Sydney?). But to Henry, the joke was on "them". Not because he had actually won the game; but rather, because they were all losing the game, too, and were so successfully plugged into their shimmering neon demise, they didn't actually realise it.

"Sometimes, I wonder if their ignorance makes them better off, though," he eventually sighed.

I understood exactly what he meant. But I was determined he was wrong. "Oh, I wouldn't know about that," I said. "They'll lose, in the end. And imagine what that will be like for the poor buggers, when their little cradle falls off the billboard it's purched on."

"You don't think all this will last?" he said, gesturing towards the city that sparkled before us, across the harbor.

"No," I told him. "I'm not sure what will replace it, but I am sure that it will end. It has to, you know? This isn't working. It can't go on for much longer, I'd suspect. But it's going to get a lot worse, before it gets any better - if it gets better, at all. I mean, perhaps, we've just fucked it, completely."

 

There was a slight pause, after this, that bordered on uncomfortable. That never bothered me, as a rule - life was uncomfortable a great deal of the time, and I had no problem embracing and exploring that. But this was my last night in town. I didn't want to go there. Not yet. Not right now. I tried to break the heaviness of it all by mocking myself with song. "This is the end," I sang, smirking, as I immitated Jim Morrison with little success; "Beautiful friend... the end."

But instead of buying into my contrived frivolity, he hanged there in a silence with an intense stare - that probing kind one never likes when one is trying to ignore one's reality - until he offered me his revelation.

 

"You're plugged in, aren't you? You're two steps ahead."

 

"What do you mean?" I asked.

 

"You're too connected," he shrugged, helplessly.

 

"Oh, right, I see," I sighed, rolling my eyes, trying my best to defuse the conversation, and ironically choose an ignorance. "We're back on the 'ignorance is bliss' path, are we?"

 

"But it's not a choice you really have, is it?" he pushed. "You're so connected, you don't have a choice. I feel frustrated, sometimes; but you - you're on even another level, altogether."

 

"Yes, well," I  sighed - this time, a sigh of submission; "There's a fine line between 'gift' and 'curse', etcetera, etcetera."

 

This was followed by another silence accompanied by a pentrating stare (or at least, a stare that was trying to penetrate), until this time, he smiled. "I wonder what people would have thought on the Titanic, if someone had've told them they were going to sink."

 

"They would have told him that he was a madman," I smirked. 

 

"But it will sink."

 

"Yes," I smiled, softly (as strange as it seems to smile in response to such a comment). "It will. I just don't know how, exactly, or when."

 

"Soon," he said, perhaps in a cruel kind of hope.

 

"Yes," I agreed. "Soon. But the madman would have been smart enough to get off the ship, by then." 

 

"As long as the madman can swim," he smiled.

 

"Here's hoping," I smiled, back. 

We returned to the cottage and, well... yada, yada, yada. I fell asleep for the last time in the Emerald City - all the wizards having been revealed as fakes, my little red shoes tapping with a mild unease but a humbled acceptance - and the next morning, I woke before it was my intention, thanks to an excited Henry, who had news that simply couldn't wait for the natural return of my consciousness. 

 

"Wake up!" he shook me. "It's happening."

 

"What are you talking about, Henry? I'm sleeping," I pleaded with him, covering my face with the pillow, in the hope that if I could visually block his existence out it would simply go away (an act that, in all fairness, I'd long realised didn't work). He persisted, of course, until I succumbed, and with a great deal of pain, I opened my eyes. "Okay; what is it, Henry?" I sighed.

 

I will never forget his smile. He was smiling. It was a kind of smile that would become most taboo; but it was, all the same, a smile I have seen quietly contradict the expected monologues of regret I have heard from more than a few.

 

"It's sinking," he finally announced.

 

"What are you talking about? It's too early for metaphoric philosophy, Henry - talk literally, or let me go back to sleep." 

 

He had no intention of letting me sleep. He ripped off the bedsheets, and realising that Henry was usually more than happy to float around someone else's house while they were safely unconscious (it allowed him to raid their home for food, or clothes, or whatever else took his fancy that would have a habit of quickly disappearing), I realised that Henry's now irritating metaphor clearly had some kind of substance behind it. I did as I was told, and followed him to the living room, where he sat me down in front of the television. With great melodrama, he positioned himself beside it, and poised his hand over the power switch.

 

"Wanna know what happened while we were sleeping?" he grinned.

 

"What?"

 

And with the flick of that switch, there it was. There was a red CNN banner across the bottom of the screen, with those three magic words that would set the tone of what was to follow; "AMERICA AT WAR". And the planes flew into the towers, and in a single moment, the world changed. The ship nobody thought would ever sink had been hit.  

 

And that was that. My exit from Sydney was an escape through the frenzied murmur of a society very much jolted by the unthinkable; at every petrol station we stopped at, every corner-shop, the talk was pretty much the same. I arrived at the old house I had grown up in (my mother had finally decided to sell, and had given me the keys while her and my brother moved into their new place, before the actual sale was made), and there I sat, alone in the empty shell of my childhood. I stayed there for two months while I lived off the last of my savings, as the world around me quickly changed. Something had finally given way. And the people were frightened. Instantly, a fear was born: a fear that would later play such an integral part in the political and media (and indeed, consumer) narrative to follow - and I, too, grew quietly afraid. But I wasn't afraid of the terrorists. I wasn't afraid of "them". I was afraid of us.

The people talked with great passion and fear (or rather, a passion fueled by fear), and the entire mindset of our society shifted into a very dark space indeed. The fire in their eyes was unmistakable. On September 10th, their eyes were the soulless, empty windows to the meaningless consumer, the helpless traveller on a journey to nowhere (have a think about what our obsession and focus was before September 11th - you'll be hard-pressed to come up with much). But now, there was something that had for so long been missing. There was a meaning - at first, perhaps, unconscious, in that fire that grew within all. There was actually a sense of excitement. People had found the meaning most of them never realised was even missing from their lives. The darkest, most primal, most degrading human element had kicked in, sending a higher evolutionary mindset into oblivion. Survival had kicked in. People were alive for the first time in years. But they had found a meaning of life in a very wrong place.

For all the talk in the years to follow - the grandiose, puffy-chested diatribe of our leaders - of refusing to bend to the act of terrorism, and the will of the people to rise above it, the efficiency of 9/11 - the strange, unsettling brilliance of those attacks - has been so lost on a people so caught up in the very thing the attack intended to bring about, they have convinced themselves that they are not bending to those intentions. But if the act of terrorism is to create instability in a society through fear, then it certainly succeeded. To "rise above terrorism" would be a reality that is the complete antithesis to the one we live in, today. We haven't in any way risen above it - we have become the victims it intended us to be. 9/11 wasn't about our literal death. We think in these ridiculous terms  (Where will they strike next? Who will be killed?), but the intention of terrorism is not the literal removal of members of this society - it says so much about us that we choose to think foremost in these terms (a people who cannot think outside the egocentricity of their moment in life). Existence is more than whether you are alive or dead, and this is something the West has since made the mistake of in it's dealings with the East. "Shock and awe" isn't too awe-inspiring to anyone other than the society delivering it. We have never understood the society we have now pitted ourselves against, and that misunderstanding has only lead further to our peril. Why is it that these people will sacrifice their lives for their cause? Why is it that killing 600,000 of them hardly phases them in comparison to our reaction at losing 3000 of us, that September day? It's because we are facing a culture that is not about the individual, as is ours. And that's partly a contextual element - they are tied to their history, to something bigger than the immedite experience of one's own life and desires, because they have never been able to leave it. They have lived in an ageless struggle. We, on the other hand, have spent the last fifty years in a bubble, within which the mentality of "I" (the core of consumer culture) grew to dominate and define the Western experience of "being". The Middle East has forever been engaged in war. We, on the other hand, have been safely tucked away from it. While they have fought and died in their millions, we've marvelled at the latest Reeboks.

 

In short, the mindset of "we" (or "us") is a logical rection to war. War works against our evolution - it's not what human beings are supposed to be doing - and nobody says it better or simpler than the wonderful Robert Fisk (from his book, "The Great War For Civilisation" - which you should be making sure you read, and can purchase by clicking here ); "It represents the total failure of the human spirit". It's so very true - and it's only natural that this environment stunts or reverses our evolution, creating a society and people who cannot rise above the most basic pre-occupation with survival (where numbers, and clearly divided lines of battle, matter). When we are at war, our evolution is in retrograde.

 

And if we look back over even our own society, you'll find periods of time similar to this one. One of the problems I do concede of the young left is that they do lose a bit of perspective in thinking that this is somehow entirely "new", and that we have never been here, before. In some ways, it's new; but in so many other ways, it isn't. And those who have been here for a while will know that I find this no excuse (it doesn't mean we can't recognise it as detramental, and fight against it); but still, while there are specific contextualities that are "new" (because our world, overall, has progressed - such as the role of internet in all this, which brings about new elements), we have been here, before. Whether this will be the one that finally breaks us is anyone's guess - but we have still seen these dynamics at play. And if you look at the moments in our history where collectivism, racism, and the aggressive, frightened (perhaps paranoid) concept of "us" has defined society, you will always find the one motif and causal factor.

 

War.

 

And truth be told, the fall of the Twin Towers, whilst it was presented as a declaration of war, was actually a war that had been waged for a long time - a war that already included the USA (though the perspective of 9/11 as "retaliation" - what it was intended to be - was never something we were going to, or even be "allowed" to, grasp). But whatever the case, it was the moment when this war, for us little folk here in the modern Western bubble, "began". Bush, puffed up like a peacock with the brain of a sparrow, delivered to culture that now infamous, wickedly ambiguous term, "The War On Terror". It was on. The clash of the East and the West - a clash that had for ages been predominantly about the economic power of oil - had been waged for centuries. But now, an act of this war had been waged on Western ground. It was on.

 

And with frightening speed, we changed, accordingly. We became a people at war. And ironically, with alarming hypocrisy (unable to grasp it, as we became consumed by an increasingly irrational schema, fueled by the most basic emotions), we started becoming the very thing we opposed. We became what Middle eastern and most of Islaamic society had been for eternity - a society of "we". The collective became bigger than the individual. "Either you're with us, or against us," the cliche goes. "Governments like it that way," wrote Fisk; "They want their people to see war as a drama of opposites, good and evil, 'them' and 'us', victory or defeat." And that's exactly how it was presented, and exactly what became of us. Like the era of communism ("reds under the bed"), we reacted by first endeavouring to cleanse our society of the potential evil within - to make it clear just who was "them" and who was "us".