Where Was Your Passport Issued?

My passport says I’m Australian.

You can say many bad things about Australia: our prime minister isn’t that impressive, the recent budget sucks, a salad can cost $20, shops close too early and we have to fly for loads of hours to get to Asia, Europe or America.

Yes, we’re very far away from a cool holiday, but look on the bright side. We have a massive country, with our very own borders and we don’t have to share with anyone! We’re so far away from the rest of the world that nobody ever bothers to attack us, sweet.

Now that we’ve talked about the pros and cons of living in Australia, allow me to explain why I bothered to mention any of that.

Earlier this evening I came across a video on my Facebook newsfeed captioned, “ISRAELI DOGS,” followed by, “The lowest of scums. They steal the land of the palestenians, and continue abusing them. Abusing their women and children! ‘Israeli’ dogs.”

The video was posted by a Melbourne resident, a citizen of our country, who went through our education system and lives inside our very peaceful borders.

Before we begin to decipher this stupid post and this stupid behaviour, I’ll ask you to ignore the obvious lack of intelligence of this person, his inability to spell the name of the land he is standing up for and his inability to construct a constructive caption.

If the lowest form of wit is sarcasm (forgive my lack of wit), then the lowest form of debating is hurling abuse (I couldn’t resist).

What this gentleman (used loosely) has failed to realise is that by posting this video with such a caption, he has done nothing but embarrass himself and prove absolutely no point.

Australia is one of the most multicultural countries in the world. We are a young country that is greatly based on the influence of immigrants. Our most popular cuisines are Italian, Chinese, Thai, Indian, Middle Eastern, etc. We are a nation that accommodates people from hundreds of countries around the world and as magical as that sounds, it also creates a large issue.

The issue I’m referring to is one I have noticed more and more over time. It usually comes in the form of a young, ego filled person who feels the need to represent their culture or religion to the people around them. They are so desperate to feel and show pride in their cultural background that they forget about where they live and who they are constantly surrounded by. A young, uneducated, spoilt Australian who wants to feel like someone unique.

Sometimes, it’s a fight at the tennis between a person of Serbian heritage and a person of Croatian heritage. It’s a nightclub brawl between a group of people with Greek heritage and a group of people with Italian heritage, the list goes on.

After turning 18 and beginning to hit the town more often, I kept witnessing such egotistical battles over and over again. Everybody was out to prove that the history or current state of “their country” was better than that of someone else’s, all the while living in a country where such issues would probably never have to be faced and failing to appreciate that fact.

It wasn’t until I attended a “Full Moon Party” in Thailand that I realised that the people of these countries that were being represented in Australia were nothing like what I had thought them to be. I remember sitting on a small speedboat on our way over to Koh Phangan, turning to my friend and saying “I feel like there’s going to be a lot of trouble at this party, with the amount of trouble you see on a night out on Chapel St, imagine what’s going to happen when people of all these countries meet on one beach.” I was wrong. Australia had taught me wrong. There was no trouble, zero trouble, not one incident, not one argument, not one idiot turning to another person and trying to bully them because of the country that they were from. In fact, it was the opposite. People walked around proudly with their country’s flag tattooed on their skin, they laughed, they danced and they were merry.

So I made a realisation. These ignorant children who were most likely born in Australia to immigrant parents and had no real understanding of the current situation in the country that their parents were from, have it all wrong. They may have grown up in a home where their parents yelled a few opinions about another culture or religion, maybe they had extremely strong views because they’d been scarred by events they had been through while growing up in a much less stable country, who knows. But, one thing is for certain, they sacrificed a lot to get here and are extremely grateful to be living in the secure land that is Australia and they would be ashamed to see the disgusting, unappreciative behaviour of their children in a country that they worked so hard to gift to their kids.

So rather than sharing a negative, hateful view and taking a swipe at an entire nation or religion because you saw a video on the internet, perhaps it’s time to learn to focus on what you have, where you live and remember where your passport was issued.