Last year, thousands of Australians took part in the annual “Keep Australia Beautiful” campaign. Schools, companies, charities, celebrities all get involved and get to work cleaning up our great Australian landscape with their bare hands. It’s dirty work, but it has to be done. We get tongs, and garbage bags… we don our rubber gloves and we put some elbow grease into it.
Last year over 800 tonnes of rubbish was collected and disposed of!
The latest thing is “Going Green” and this is also another huge effort to preserve our natural environment and way of life. We see commercials urging us to recycle and switch to energy efficient light bulbs, to ride our bikes to work instead of always driving our cars, and there are always plenty of new inventions coming to our attention which make ‘going green’ more streamlined.
Now, I have been known to hug trees and am respectful and thoughtful about the way I live and how it affects my surroundings. Like Kermit the Frog said, “It’s not easy being Green…” but it’s well worth it to preserve the natural beauty that our country is to behold.
But as an avid supporter of the underdog (it’s the Australian way, after all.) I am pretty satisfied that we’re doing pretty well with that side of things, but I am seeing a whole lot of neglect when it comes to other parts of our environment. You guessed it, the Media. Violence, sex, profanity, dark and disturbing themes, crime… it is everywhere we look. It’s on our televisions, computers, mobile phones, magazines, music, on billboards as we drive to work. There isn’t much that we do during the day, that doesn’t involve contact with one of these mediums. Therefore there is a constant onslaught of tasteless advertising and entertainment, which we wouldn’t necessarily go out actively looking for.
So why would we want to see it otherwise?
Well for one, because we have come to accept it as part of our environment.
Why? We refused to accept other things in our society when it comes to our natural environment, why not this? Because the Media is very clever, and the slow and steady desensitization has only served to allow the standard of what’s acceptable to go lower and lower until we are at the point where sex is used to sell anything from cereal to furniture and kitchenware. Obviously we are sending a message, as the public that this type of advertising works. Are we all crazed nymphomaniacs who find it absolutely essential for our new dinnerware to, as their advertising would have us believe, get a really sexy member of the opposite sex into bed with us? Ah, I should think not.
What good is our green and clean landscape with all that junk floating on the surface? How clean is our country really, if the minds, lives, and homes of it’s residents are not? The answer; Not very beautiful at all.