Enough about the morons

This is Farah.  
     Even if you’ve never heard of the Prince of Persia series, there’s something about this svelte huntress that makes you look again.
     Okay, she’s sexy—difficult to miss! That’s not it, though; try again. Lara Croft is sexy. But once you get over those Barbie-doll proportions, well… she’s just a cute historian with sunglasses, cargo shorts and an accent. Farah moves beyond eye-candy to someplace else.
     She’s intense.
     She’s exotic.
     As for intensity, let’s face it, 48 hours straight of Seinfeld can be intense. A trigonometry test can be intense. Bowel surgery can be intense (with the added bonus of being more pleasant than watching Seinfeld). Intense doesn’t need to be interesting. And, if anything, the beautiful, deadly and intense heroine has been done before. More than once. But exotic? Hmmm… not so common.
     Of course, the fear generated by politicians and the media after two passenger jets, two office towers and two gulf wars has ensured the rest of the world looks at the whole Middle East differently. I don’t need to talk about the fallout; we’ve all seen it. Rednecks intimidating anyone of ethnicity, vandalised mosques, border security paranoia, easter-egg hunts for weapons of mass destruction… (check under your couch, they have to be somewhere!). None of it makes sense. None of it is justified or acceptable. And it’s a long way from how civilised humans should act.
     Our sleepy, apathetic island on the quiet side of the world is now witnessing race-fuelled rioting and victimisation. Intolerance and prejudice have arrived like a some kind of behavioural cane toad. If you’re reading this, and you were involved in the Cronulla riots late last year—congratulations, you pushed Australian society back about 50 years, and brought the notion of DownUnder as a peaceful, easygoing place into question. Go sit in the corner ‘til you figure out what an idiot you are. Pack lunch, you could be there a while.
     So, enough about the morons; they’re the reason hairdriers have a tag that says, ‘Do not use in the shower’. But what about the rest of us? The most frightening thing about the intolerance/prejudice combo is its insidious nature. After all, we’re not like those rednecks, are we? We don’t expect all farmers to be aging white men in overalls. We don’t prefer our acupuncturist to be Asian, our greengrocer Mediterranean, our doctor Caucasian. We don’t mind male attendants in lingerie shops, and females selling power tools and car parts. We don’t feel inclined to say, ‘You know Mary’s gay?’ any more than, ‘You know Sarah’s straight?’ Do we?
     Is there a glimmer of hope in the darkness, like the flashing cursor on a Commodore 64? After being fed bulletin after bulletin about Saddam, Osama, the tyranny of boat people and the Houdini-like WMDs, have we had our fill? I’d like to believe phenomenon like Farah signal the turning of the tide.
     Farah’s clearly Indian/Middle-Eastern. She’s clearly militant. That goes a long way towards the ‘exotic’ tag. But as a character she’s also relatively popular among Prince of Persia fans all over the world, particularly western countries, the traditional home and habitat of the joystick junkie. And without sounding too much like Mike Moore, the fact she’s popular seems a little odd. Her extensive acceptance certainly indicates something. A character so essentially 'foreign', intelligent and intimidating embodies all we’ve been told to fear for five years now. But rather than feeling uneasy, we are drawn to her. Farah is a colleague, a companion. Even, a lover. We do not want to fight her, we want to fight with her.
     A peaceful world needs to begin with the recognition of every person’s right to be different. We need to understand that attempting to homogenise the human race into a planet of cultural clones is not only detrimental, it’s dangerous. It might sound naïve, but if our diversity is really celebrated, rather than our dissimilarities feared, we could truly evolve as a species.
     I hope we can do this. I hope the greed of corporations, the brutality of the media and the irrationalism of governments is quelled. I hope humanity shines though.
     Above all, I hope I never see Farah in cargo shorts.

Words: David Hockley