Take a seat, kiddo

I was 11 in my first year of high school. Even at that age I was, at best, an agnostic, but yet my favourite teacher was one of the Christian Brothers. It didn’t hurt his cool factor, that his biological brother was the vet on A Country Practice.

He had asked that we present our thoughts about something we’d seen on TV to the class. I don’t remember what any of my class mates spoke about my I certain remember mine. Two guys from Perth, Kevin Barlow and Brian Chambers, were about to be hung in Malaysia for trafficking heroin. I was horrified, they were only a couple of years younger than my mum and they were going to be killed, halfway around the world away from their families. It’s not like they killed someone. The method of execution added to my upset. It just seemed barbaric.

I can still remember standing at the front of that room, body shaking and voice cracking as I said it was cruel and unfair. There had to be something we could do. Then I walked back to my desk and cried. My favourite teacher tapped my shoulder and smile. He was letting me know he thought I had done a good job. Just before dawn on July 7 that same year, 15 days before my 12th birthday, Kevin Barlow and Brian Chambers were walked to the gallows and hanged on the grounds of Kuala Lumpur’s Pudu Prison.

Since that day, my opinion on that particular issue have changed and shifted with new information and life experience but it don’t make the feelings or the opinions I held as an 11 year old, invalid.For at least two generations, it has been a stable of our family that when a child asked a question, we answer honestly, age appropriately, but honestly. It never occurred to me until later in life that this was a radical idea. I was respectful and polite (if I do say so myself) but I was treated like a tiny human and not an accessory. Not someone to be fobbed off because the answer to whatever I was asking was embarrassing or too hard to explain. It was this attitude that made me curious. That made me question my own moral compass as part of all the decisions I make to this day.

All these things were on my mind when I watched grown adults in the media and people on my own social pages, calling a 9-year-old girl a brat and threatening to kick her up the backside for not standing during that national anthem. More than anything what threw me, was the idea that because she was 9, she couldn’t possible have morals or standards that she felt strongly about. Like she was not a person of value. I would never ask another person to substitute my moral standards for their own. That was exactly what people were insisting that she do, because she is 9.

She didn’t have a tantrum, she respectful sat down during a song she has a moral issue with. The fact that someone’s reaction to that is talk about laying their hands on her says more about them than it does about her. She had a perfectly well articulated point.

If the argument is about respect for the anthem. There is no law in this country to say that we need to stand for the national anthem because we are not living in a police state and forced nationalism is the opposite of everything this country is meant to stand for.

If your argument is that it is about that it is a rule of the school. School is not, nor should it be, about turning our kids into sheep. It’s about teaching them critical thought and you would hope about kindness and social justice. If there is no room in the system for a girl respectfully sitting down on a matter of principle, then the system is broken. Let’s not forget that blind obedience to authority in schools and children being scared to speak up is the reason for generations of systematic institutional child abuse which has been well documented.

For those calling her brain washed by her parents. The fact that you think a 9-year-old is not capable of being given factual information and having their own feelings about it has never met any of the 9-year-olds I know. For a non-religious person who went through the catholic school system, where most of my friends were baptised as babies and do the first holy communion at the age of 7, it’s interesting that those parental choices are never questioned in this same negative context.

I want a generation of kids who have principles, it would be a nice change from those in public and political life who talk about them but don’t actually seem to possess them. Maybe they don’t understand Harper’s principles because they don’t have any of their own that wouldn’t change with a shift in the wind.

Congratulations to her parent for raising a brave and free-thinking girl. It’s not always easy to do the right thing but she will always remember that you had her back at this critical time.