This week I have been working on an event for an Australian women’s network. This year is their fiftieth anniversary and they are celebrating by visiting the nation’s capital. A number of women spoke at yesterday’s opening luncheon including Pru Goward. Naturally I didn’t get to listen to many of their speeches because I was working but I did get to listen to Pru’s and, while she said many notable things, when she said, “we can never underestimate the power of informed conversation”, I was struck to remember that.
I’ve always been interested in current affairs. I think this stems from having a mother that didn’t “protect me from the daily news” and wanted me to know what was happening in the world. I remember being seven years old and discussing the 2004 Olympic bid in depth with her.
That isn’t my first memory of acknowledging the world around me. In 1995, when South Africa played New Zealand in the Rugby World Cup, I was struck by the affect that one game had on, not only those I loved, but the general public in which I found myself.
Ignorant people have always annoyed me. In my opinion, there is no excuse for not knowing about the BP Oil Spill off the Gulf of Mexico or the floods in Pakistan or, more close to home, the politics surrounding Gillard and Abbott amongst others.
I may write this from an incredibly privileged point of view. I live in a first world country, I am studying at a tertiary level of education and I have unlimited access to media via computers, magazines and newspapers so, for the purposes of this post, I am not referring to those less fortunate than myself but rather those with which I surround myself.
There is, however, one thing that is worse than conversing with a person who has no clue what you are talking about due to pure lack of interest in the world around them. There are those people who haven’t taken the time to find out the truth and develop a substantial opinion based on fact as opposed to superficial assumptions of a certain affair. Those who feel Julia Gillard should be Prime Minister “because she is a woman” or those who look at a picture of an African man dressed in a suit and call him Robert Mugabe or Nelson Mandela because those are the only names they know.
Robin Morgan wrote that knowledge and information is power. This holds true. It makes for far more interesting people, creates more interesting conversations and fosters more interesting relationships.
