[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]So…. as the title of this blog post suggests, this is not a happy post. I am not in a particularly good mood.

I do a few things in my life…. I play the cello. I give concerts. I also teach music to kids.

A lot of the kids I teach are disadvantaged. ‘Disadvantage’ is a pretty loaded word. It could mean loved children in remote areas. It could mean kids in foster care. It could also mean a family who have just had their oldest child stabbed to death over 100 times by an ice addict.

Read that last sentence again. That was me this week.

Now add this into the mix. The family know the other family of the ice addict, because the community is close.

And these children are sent to school on Monday. And the lovely, lovely teachers that I work with pick up the pieces, and continue on. And it is stuff like music that makes these kids who are grieving and whose world has just been turned upside-down smile for a little while.

And yet I feel like I’m sticking a band-aid over a gaping wound that continues to bleed.

And the charity I work for has to fight and fight and fight to get money to continue.

And yet over $200 million dollars is given to athletes to go and run very fast or swim very fast (actually, they did neither of those things particularly fast, did they?). Or politicians spend a whole lot of money debating superannuation laws so that the rich can remain so.

And the kids I see are coping with stuff like this. What will happen to this family now? What will happen to these little people?

I can guess. You see, the oldest one will get lippier. And she will go to an overcrowded high school, where the teachers are drowning in paperwork and don’t have the time to help her, or the inclination, because they are being criticised left right and centre. And so she will be ‘asked to leave’, or branded as trouble, and become known as ‘difficult’. There will be fights in the community. There will be retaliations. And none of it will be reported, because it’s commonplace.

And the people who are trying to do good will become burned out, because they work for next-to-nothing, and slowly give up.

And the rich will continue to get richer. And renovate their homes. And send their children to schools with three swimming pools, and a shooting range, and continue to be frightened of ‘the blacks’, or ‘the Muslims’. And the media will make us more scared, and not say the truth. And the superannuation rates will only help the wealthy.

Have I made you shake your head in worry? Or disbelief? I stand by all that I’ve said.

Is it hopeless? Right now, I feel it is.

Probably tomorrow I’ll have the strength to do it all again.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]