Doctor says "My goodness! How can I help?" Snake says "Are you blind? I have something stuck in my throat!"

Have you ever thought how easy it is to misjudge someone if the information you are basing your judgment on is out of context?

I remember being about fifteen and going to several social workers, psychologists and career advisers at that time and being in the presence of people whose job was to make judgments about whom I was to become and even to provide records of who I was in these times.

I think the first might have been one at Parramatta in a building that was to become Probation and Parole. I was there for some career and psychological assessment. Whoever the questioner was they brought the full weight of their prejudice and narrow-minded conservative views into their job that day.

I remember being asked who I hung about with and answering “just the gang”. I remember the sharpening of the look and the body language as interest increased. In my mind I had said “the gang” in the same terms as one might say just a usual bunch of friends and school mates but the questioner had heard me say something devilish.

The conversation wandered all over the place with the social worker trying to get me to admit some evil agenda albeit without me noticing what was happening.

Finally we hit on the subject of weapons. Now I am a military brat and had been doing martial arts since I was very young. At that time I was doing a period of study including combat with a knife and defending against a knife. I was theoretically studying how people killed in close combat and how to deal with an enemy who had that as an intention.

I was quite happy to discuss methods of wielding a knife in one-on-one combat with this social worker and I was surprised that she was interested. It wasn’t too long before I noticed that she seemed to be breathing deeply and glowering particularly when I explained that a knife was often better driven in and slashed upwards than just stuck in and pulled out. I remember her face going red when I told her that just sticking a knife into someone’s guts might mean you had to put your foot on their guts to pull it out or even shoot an exit hole.

In my mind I was reliving an old bayonet instruction video I had seen during a martial arts seminar. In her mind I was reliving some murderous event or horrible desire to gut innocent citizens. The next week I was studying the mystical in martial arts and would have been easier to draw into discussion on that than the past lessons of bayonet and knife. Or months later it would have been stick weapons and after that acupressure points for healing minor illnesses and controlling pain.

I have often wondered what that stupid woman actually did with her terrible misconceptions.

There was a man, psychologist,counselor,careers adviser, who constantly did this little acting-out session with a magic red-button. He would ask a question such as “what if there was a big red-button that would kill all the people….” bang! I would hit the button.

I knew what was happening in this guy’s tiny mind. He had decided that I was capable of pushing a real button and exterminating all life and that I was a dangerous sociopath. He actually wrote it in some report that followed me about for years. It may still be following me about.

This is the danger of presenting complex ideas to simple-minded conservative christian elitists. They don’t have the tapestry of knowledge to give them context. Particularly in the nineteen seventies when all things still seemed black and white to such people.

At some time during the conversation we entered into the subject of the position of humans on the earth. He wanted me to mention something that had to do with mankind being given reign over the planet by God (note the capital G). I was a very well-educated little pagan who was fighting dams in Tasmania and the insane world population growth, rampant pollution and corporate crimes against humanity so I thought the best thing that could happen was that mankind would lose a large part of its ability to damage nature. I made it plain that I considered a dog to have more right to a place on the planet than most of the people who paraded about as a dog’s master.

Being a military brat and totally unimpressed by this guy I think I put that as, “I would shoot you before I would harm a dog ” I like dogs.

Now the conversation went to that old nut. Would I suffer pangs of conscience if I killed someone, could I kill someone? I will mention again. Military brat. I learned some of my first ideas of self defense and close combat at the knees of men who still had the jungles of Vietnam in their eyes. I fully expected to see a war in my time and was prepared to fight in it as soon as it happened. Not for glory or joy of harming others but because it had been the duty of the men in my family for many generations.

I often wondered what he really thought. A normally generous human might have suspected I was a rebelling teenager looking for a rise from an adult. Another might have asked the question about what context I was imagining that situation to have arisen

For the questioner I exhibited a horrific anti-christian, anti human mind-set that had to be evil and sociopathic rather than just an alternate view of the world. He saw a fifteen year old CHILD who would kill the entire human race with the push of a single button if the opportunity came up. He actually writhed in his chair when I dared suggest that the monotheist religions had lost contact with the reality of the world they left their mark on and had a great deal to answer for in the current set of world problems. I would say the same thing today although now he would be aware that people had been thinking the same thing all across the world

I saw myself as a campaigner of the highest ideals prepared to meet a duty of care passed across generations to make a safer and more wholesome world for all the travelers on the planet as well as humans. The whole red-button thing was a bit of a joke I was seeing as expressing my ideal of ridding us of a great deal of our bad habits.

His judgment based on misconception and out of context remarks and understanding has been a very common aspect of many people’s lives and it has not always been wholly innocent. It is one of the weapons of the bigot. The seemingly innocent misreading of facts and ideas. The exaggeration and disinformation. Having said that there are many self-important, well-educated socially-prominent fools around. In this case I think the man was a malicious, vindictive wart who wanted to harm me for not sharing his well-digested, myopic christian values. Plenty of those about too! These were, after all, the days when a lot of good christians wanted people jailed for having long hair!

Oh, by the way. The Australian Government is about to provide linked permanent computer records of people’s medical records online. I don’t understand why they think these records will be accurate or why many of us would rather leave the input from some medical idiots behind us