Thursday, May 27, 2010

No Sugar - Greg Egan

"During the recent election campaign, the Opposition Leader Kim Beazley declared that, like the Prime Minister, he would not allow Ahmed Alzalimi — an Iraqi man whose claim for asylum had been accepted — to return to this country if he went to Indonesia to be with his wife, after his three daughters had drowned while trying to join him. When politics descends to that level of competitive cruelty, when the surest claim on electoral popularity is the size of the splinter of ice in your heart, the whole country is degraded.

That's what it's like, though, living with no sugar: working relentlessly to create a society so vile that no one in the world would choose to be a part of it. It takes a lot of effort to poison a calm, civilised, prosperous democracy to the point where people would rather eat grass or live under a dictatorship than attempt to come here, but if we keep it up, we'll get there."


5 out of 5

http://www.gregegan.net/ESSAYS/SUGAR/Sugar.html

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