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Anyone for a Mug Cake?

7/30/2016

You see, I don't always blog about earth-shattering events or subject matters. Sometimes I just feel the urge to whinge about something stupid.....

There is something terribly wrong about this. I think it was a mistake to have even thought of it!
You’ve heard of those awful packet things called cup-a-soup? You may have even been brave enough to eat (drink?) one?

Well, here comes ‘Cup-a-Cake’:
‘White Wings is now selling a cake mix product which allows consumers to cook a cake in a cup using a microwave.
The cake can be cooked within one minute and is promoted as an easy solution for those who do not want to oven-bake an entire cake’.
(How mean!)
‘Cake in a Cup comes in three flavours, double chocolate, raspberry and coconut and salted caramel and choc chip.’
It’s actually called ‘Cake in a Cup’ and ‘is available in supermarkets for about $5 for a box of four servings.’

Here’s the promo:

From Cup to Cake in 1 minute..... Warm, fluffy and delicious cake in just one minute, with no oven baking required. Simply empty the contents of the packet into a cup, add two tablespoons of milk, stir vigorously, microwave for one minute - and voila!
A delicious cake, with that gorgeous freshly baked aroma, for your pure enjoyment.
With three flavours to choose from, satisfy any occasion in just a minute.

Well, apart from me having the old-fashioned idea that cakes are baked to SHARE and can be a pleasant way to end a meal or to accompany a morning or afternoon tea – or coffee - with family or friends, what else do we know about this selfish way of making (making?) a cake?
Apparently (according to dietician, Rebecca Bradford), of the 15 ingredients in this Cake-in-a-Cup, eight are additives, including emulsifiers, artificial flavours and antioxidants. And, I think the antioxidants are not the ones that people ingest to help their good health progress but are additives to keep the mix from ‘going off’ – that is, to preserve the Cake-in-a-Cup ingredients while it sits on the supermarket shelf – or, heaven forbid – in your pantry.

The promo suggests that the ‘Cake in a Cup’ will ‘satisfy any occasion in just a minute.’
Just what sort of ‘occasion’ are we visualising?
I honestly cannot think of any occasion that such a thing would ‘satisfy’. Can you?

PS: Thanks to Sunday Mail (Courier Mail, Qld)

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A Baby is not Just a Baby

7/24/2016

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Remember the animal welfare slogan, ‘A puppy is not just for Christmas’ – or more accurately, ‘A dog is for life, not just for Christmas’?
Well, I wish a similar slogan could be drummed home to people everywhere, but referring to babies in place of dogs. (And forget the Christmas reference).

A baby is NOT just a baby. They are a responsibility that you must love and care for and work for and cherish for as long as you live.

Two reports lately – from two different states – are concentrating on child welfare. And, yes, I know that I have written about this before, including just recently. But I can’t help thinking that most of these horrendous chid welfare problems could be remedied – prevented, really - if people took more thought to the random ‘mating’ that results in unplanned babies being born. Babies whose existence has not been thought through; their progression into children and PEOPLE has not been considered.

The story I told in the previous blog about a tiny child being beaten and abused over months, resulting in his death, is not an isolated case. It has happened before and, as in this case, the welfare workers and government departments are the people who ultimately receive the ‘blame’.
Why?
No, don’t answer. Of course we accept that, if it is someone’s job to care for the welfare of children and they neglect to do so, then blame should be apportioned.
But…but…they (the workers) didn’t choose to produce this child, nor abuse him.
Comment in a newspaper: “What good is any government that is unable to protect its most vulnerable citizens?” (Des Houghton, Courier Mail, 10/7).

Surely interest should also be more on how did these neglected little people come to be?

This week, in another news report (from a different state), the emphasis is on parents who have had a child or children taken from them because of abuse. The gist of this story is that these (mostly extremely) neglectful parents all want their children back. In the report, it was stressed that there was a need for parents to have and nurture their own children, with the negative effect of foster care being a defining point. But….if the parents had nurtured their children in the first place, I hardly think they would have been ‘taken from them’.
I am left scratching my head!
There are some who now blame foster care for damaging children, asking, ‘are they really better off away from their families?’ (SMH, 23/7)
Well, I’d say, yes, if it saves them from abuse and even murder.

Here are some sobering facts:

(From the Australian Institute of Family Studies):
In the 2014-15 financial year there were 445 child deaths registered in Queensland (QFCC, 2015). Suicide was the leading external cause of death for children and young people (28 deaths) in 2014-15. Drowning was the cause of death for 16 children and fatal assault and neglect was the reason for 14 child deaths. The high number of deaths attributed to fatal assault or neglect in 2014-15 was in part due to one incident that involved multiple fatalities. Nine children were victims of domestic homicide, four children died as a result of fatal abuse and neonaticide was the cause of death for one child.

A New South Wales Ombudsman report stated that, in NSW,

83 children were killed in circumstances of familial abuse over the ten years to 2013.

Monash University's Filicide Research Project estimates that between 25 to 27 children are the victims of filicide across the country each year.

(Filicide: ‘the killing of one's son or daughter’)

Possibly children have been killed by their parents all throughout history. But there seems to be an inordinately high amount of this sort of tragedy happening in our now supposedly enlightened and well-educated times.

Many years ago, the threat of a ‘shot-gun’ wedding seemed to be enough to deter many young people from embarking on actions leading to an unwanted pregnancy.
Then, after the ‘Swinging Sixties’ when ‘free love’ abounded, mostly owing to the availability of contraception, cohabiting and ‘free’ sex became the norm.

But, somewhere along the way, people seemed to forget the ways of safe (baby free) coupling and relaxed their watch.
As babies born ‘out of wedlock’ were no longer considered to be bastards and mothers were not ostracised for producing babies ‘at random’, along came thoughtless baby-producing.

Even the government stepped in and gave money to help these parents – often only the mother. This appeared to almost encourage (thoughtless) reproduction.
But what of the babies?

I hesitate to suggest that schools take on yet another responsibility, but maybe there should be lessons – not on how to care for baby but on what a baby means.
Maybe, just maybe, kids should be told about life with a baby.
Let them know about babies who wee and poo and vomit and scream and do not sleep and forever stop you from having time for yourself and so on.
That babies need to be washed and looked after in a million different ways. And that need is constant. They must be fed properly and clothed and provided for – at the expense of your wants and needs.

Here’s a message for kids and irresponsible adults to heed:
Most importantly of all, your baby MUST be loved, cherished, feel wanted and carefully cared for 24 hours of every day.
So think carefully before you take the risk of pregnancy.
A baby is for life.

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What has Changed in 40 Years? Seeking Asylum...

7/13/2016

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A couple of days ago I watched the compelling and unsettling documentary, Chasing Asylum.
Seeing what is happening in our off-shore detention centres made me ashamed to be an Australian. Of course I KNEW of these shocking situations, but to see it - and try to take it all in - was overwhelming.

It was just over 40 years ago that a fishing vessel carrying a small number of Vietnamese refugees landed in Australia. These were desperate people.
As time went by a further 2000 ‘boat people’ arrived; most on unsuitable and rickety vessels.
There is a lot more to this story. It involves political decisions and changes in attitudes. Something had to be done. It was not an easy task.

But eventually a better formal refugee program was introduced and more ‘authorised’ refugees were accepted and settled, which stopped the terrible risky boat journeys.

So, all those years ago, we had a ‘Stop the Boats’ system that worked and, eventually about 90,000 Vietnamese refugees arrived by plane, after being processed in offshore camps in S.E Asia. This processing usually took less than three months, before they were settled in Australia.
From those early 1970s arrivals, the Australian Vietnamese community is now estimated to be over 200,000…that is, counting the next generation.
The immense positive contribution to Australia by people originally from Vietnam is incalculable.

But now we have refugees from other war-torn parts of the world seeking asylum in Australia who are imprisoned in ‘off-shore’ detention places – and have been there for years.

Remember – processing of asylum seekers used to take three months. Is any ‘processing’ being done at all lately? I suspect not!

Asylum seekers in detention are rotting away, neglected - with nothing to do and nothing to hope for. There is no vision of hope for them and, as they sweat and struggle in these tropical hell holes on Manus Island and Nauru, we, the Australian people, are spending over ONE BILLION dollars, repeat: over ONE BILLION dollars a year on housing and guarding (!) these poor people; people who have already witnessed and experienced horrors that you and I cannot even imagine.

For the record, it is NOT illegal to seek asylum, so these people are NOT illegal.

Surely someone from some leading political party can go back into our forty-year history and see how the Fraser government dealt with refugees in the 1970s and 80s. Is there anyone still alive who helped formulate the policies that both stopped the boats and saved the bodies and souls of desperate people? Someone able to advise, if (surely not) details of that program have been lost?
If not for the sake of the refugees, for the mercenary sake of stemming the financially crippling cost.

What has made us so racist, red-necked, xenophobic, selfish and cruel that we can do this to other human beings?

A call to politicians of any persuasion: Risk being unpopular for just a short while and do something that will make us remember you as someone decent .

To add:
There is a small paragraph in British writer A.A.Gill’s excellent memoir, ‘Pour Me’, where he is writing about Syrian refugees landing in Lampedusa. It really strikes home:
“…if you would come face to face with these people you would never turn them away. You could not but help them. We all of us strive to be good, to be decent, to do the right thing. It is only their anonymity that allows us to support policies that turn our backs on them, send them away, bury them in internment camps and embargoes. It is perfectly simple – if you were confronted with their humanity, then simultaneously you would be confronted with your own. I want to write this over and over and over again.”

True, so true.

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What Value Children?

7/13/2016

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Sorry, an unhappy whinge today.
I can hardly bear to write about this.
In the News: At 20 months of age, a tiny boy was found dead in his cot. Signs of repeated abuse of his little body, resulting in ‘horrific injuries’, had been noted in the months before his death and yet he was not saved.

And, it seems that the blame (blame?!) has landed at the feet of the (child care) social workers. They are workers, for goodness sake. It must be a tremendously difficult job for them to keep tabs on neglected children. Sadly it means paper-work and sometimes foot slog and lots of meetings and so on. Case workers leave their desks at the end of their working day and go home to their families. They are not able to watch over their little ‘clients’ 24 hours of the day. Nor are they tied to the children by their heart strings as a parent or family should be – and in usual circumstances is. Sure, this was shocking neglect on the part of a government department and I quote, from the spokesperson for Child Safety: ‘The failure of the department to protect the most vulnerable (is) a scandal’.

Yes, true, but the bigger scandal is that people seem to be copulating randomly, with little or no thought of consequences and thereby producing children they do not want nor care for.
That each and every child is not cherished by his or her parents is the biggest scandal of all. And a tragedy of immense proportions.

From another state comes a report of a man charged with murdering his girlfriend’s 11 month old baby. The child was not his.
Less than two years ago this young woman had been in a relationship and become pregnant. A baby was born and 11 months later she had re-partnered with a man - who then killed the infant.
All that took about 20 months; not a very long time.
And eleven months is certainly a very short life; possibly a sad and painful one as well. I don’t know the details of that story so I’ll try not to judge too harshly but it seems that some relationships (or are they merely encounters?) don’t last long and are therefore hardly stable enough to sustain a family with babies and children.

Here’s another: The body of a missing twelve-year-old was distressingly found dumped by a river. Murdered. She was a girl who had lived all her life ‘in care’ – brought up by people other than her own parents (or parent, or family). The reason given for this was that her mother was only 18 when she had given birth and therefore too young to care for her. But, that was 12 years ago. The mother would be 30 by now and surely able to care for her daughter. But no; she was presently too occupied with her other children - and a pregnancy.
Sigh!

What are we doing that babies and children are virtually discarded? Are disposable?

And, yet, on the other hand, there are desperate (potential) mothers & fathers who would do anything to become parents. Whole books have been written about the quest for motherhood.
What’s going on?

It’s not only the thought of battered children - or murdered children – that worries me.

Last week a news story told of a house fire (in another state) where five children escaped on their own, as there was no adult present at the time. It was 2 AM when fire crews arrived to put out the fire. The children’s ages ranged from two to 14. They were home alone, in the middle of the night and the house caught fire.

Another house-fire story from the past is almost permanently imprinted in my mind. Again, the mother (this time ‘a single mother of seven’) was filmed for the TV News, surrounded by a gaggle of small children, in front of what was left of her rented house. She was sitting on the remains of the back steps and on her lap was a baby of no more than four or five months of age. The house fire was a tragedy and an appeal had been set up to help provide the family with some basic needs. But, the question in my mind was, where did all these (seven) children come from? Where was the father of (at least) the small baby in the mother’s arms? This woman was very young and possibly able to continue producing children. How would she cope with seven or more kids as they grew and demanded even more of her (and others’) time and resources?

Am I being elitist?
Am I exhibiting intolerance?

A warning…what follows may be deemed out of line, but here goes:

There are ways of preventing pregnancies. This is not the Middle Ages, when babies were caused as much by ignorance as by purposeful coupling.

Simple methods such as a man using a condom do not need expertise or medical intervention. You can buy them in the local supermarket. Girls and women perhaps should keep a supply.
A prescription for a contraceptive pill is not difficult to come by.
There is a hormone implant that prevents conception for three years and costs less than $40.
And the well known ‘Depo Provera’ hormone injection has an effect of more than three months.
Then there’s even a ‘morning after’ pill for those who ‘get caught’.

Are any of these too hard to negotiate? Methods to stop the influx of unwanted and uncared for babies – ultimately children, ultimately damaged humans?

Sure, the thought of ‘a baby’ is a comforting experience for some. A baby. Yes, but the baby needs constant attention that isn’t always a happy situation for selfish adults.
The baby turns into a demanding toddler and then into………….and on it goes until it’s not only a battered baby, it’s an abused older child and adult and often an abuser him/herself who knows no other way – and sometimes a person who sadly ends up in prison.

If that sounds tough, then check what the upbringing of many of today’s prisoners was like.

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Anyone for a Mug Cake?

A Baby is not Just a Baby

What has Changed in 40 Years? Seeking Asylum...

What Value Children?

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