The old body shop

Tis a very good thing to spend some time with some like minds over a cuppa - I know you are all busy , but if the occassion should force itself on you - do it -it will be good for you. We old timers found some time to chew the fat at the old body shop - now one of the best restuarants in town;
The few minutes of deeper sharing were , it turned out ( we don't expect to talk more than " shop") a bit of a surpise - we are so often too busy to talk - our wives not only know better on this - they do better and get together.

Best thing was - we all felt uplifted ; ready to go back to war ! Not exactly dancing , not exactly praying ( but praising Ya) Now ....how good is that!

Finding people who you can relate to can be a challenge ( blogger should help !) . We blokes seem to need an excuse to talk . This busy day we were drawn by the promotion of one of us ( always happens in the bush - we notice when we lose things ) to at least say goodday and send him away . The jobs and the passions we share are held a bit rare in a world overwhelmed by " more than we can handle", so we specially value each player that pulls a bit of weight . Nobody wanted him to go, because we struggle to keep the quorum, let alone the chorus in a country town.

The best bit? The realization afterwards as we stood around outside waiting for our wives to stop talking !!!. We had all worked very hard with a range of goverenment appointees both labor and liberal and " neither was any better than any other".
Sure ,it was a hard lesson because we worked hard with both and wasted much time uneccesarily on the treading of water . There was however good comfort in being able to share it with each other, - as if we had never shared it with another before - maybe because like now, the tentacles of dipossession and confusion run so deep.

While party changes certainly brought some welcome "new" perspective, the damage they did in reaction was bigger than any real problem we ever had in the first place . War creates casualties and the ones we lost were often the best ones . Both parties are limited deeply by the dumb reactionary world views they both share and have shared in the last 40 years. They both fire and fall over in their love of change for changes sake .
The paradox of it all is both parties each saw themselves as innovative and authors when infact they often just named the others faults to show themselves approved, encouraging the bureaubrats to play the same game to our pain Pity they don't live in the class we do where the call "takes one to know one" keeps better order and avoids this silly distraction from our own hard fought progress as a team ( thats what PSP is all about - when its not eing pulled apart b such CFCS)

The deep drama for Australia was that our professional lives, like 100's of thousands of university grads who had committed themselves to it too , (in our cases teaching children in the state system protecting rural enetrprise and environment )were cut severely short by their stupidity ( incl understanding structural constraints of PS)
As practical and effective professionals we spent much of our energy trying to resist the erosion of common sense in the workplaces we loved and sought to preserve. The battles were uneccsary and avoidable and that was what hurt so much on reflection . We were caught up holding fingers in dykes when the dyke fixing fund was full .

Why were we doing less worthy things with fingers is another story for another day, but we generally knew why at the time .( better than what might have been if we didn't)
Keeping the public service alive in the post modern period is like working in a old folks home - there is some good and efficincy producing things there somewhere and you want young people to join the chorus, but there is much to prevent the wonderful challenges of both problem fixing and prevention from getting mixed up . The old have something to teach the young but will the new ones learn? Isaiah 1:2