Advance Australia Fair...... right...........

       There is a very interesting thing that happens when you live in oz.  At first I thought it was because they knew I was from the states and they were doing some sort of discrimination thing, (that damn yankee), but upon further experience and reflection I realize that it's just the way people are down here.  Fair is the key word:  people claim that Australia is all about "fair play" and having a sense of "fairness" and the national anthem is even called "Advance Australia Fair" but in reality, I think my old neighborhood in Brooklyn had people who were more fair minded, and who were certainly kinder than most people you run into on the street here.  People down here seem to have a veneer of fair, but in reality they will gladly cut in front of you in line, steal your parking spot, ignore the pregnant lady on the tram, ignore the pregnant lady holding onto the stair rail and push past her, ignore the pregnant lady at the Scout pavilion at the Moomba festival, (are you seeing a thread here?)

        It was amazing - there I was, waiting for Audrey to have her turn at the rock climbing wall.  There was an empty chair, so I sat down because more than 30 minutes on my feet nowadays equals pain.......... and over walks a 14 yr old boy scout who proceeds to tell me to get out of his chair.  So I do, standing right in front of his face in all my pregnant glory (and I look pregnant - like an egg on legs - It's not like you would look at me and say -gee, you're putting on pounds right about where your uterus used to be - have you been hitting the junk food too hard?) and he sits down and that was that until my husband , who actually was brought up with a sense of "fair" leans over and says to him: Can my pregnant wife sit down?  So, it wouldn't be so bad if it had only happened once that day, in that spot, but it happened twice.  While Audrey was actually climbing the wall, I went to where there were other parents waiting for their kids, where there were chairs set up, and I sat down, only to be told 5 minutes later by another scout to stand because my chair was in the way, (which it wasn't).  She didn't even look twice, just made me stand, (not the other non pregnant parent next to me ).  I mean, these are the scouts!  I was a girl scout and my mom was a den mother for the boy scouts in our town and I never knew any kind of scout to be so ignorant (and I'm sure that the scout code doesn't have a part about making pregnant ladies get out of the chair).  It really doesn't speak well for the values that they teach kids here.  

    I guess I have just been noticing this behavior more since I am pregnant and only 1 person has ever offered me a seat on the tram. (Thank god I have NY subway seat sense for other times - you don't know what it's like to get a fast seat until you have ridden every day on NY's finest public transport - I'll say one thing, though, I always offered my seat to the pregnant ladies; most women in NYC will.  It's the guys who pretend that they don't exist),  That doesn't mean it's not there in the other times, it just means that a lot of Australians hide behind fair without actually understanding what it is to treat a person fairly.  The same way some Americans hide behind their patriotism.  

   In reality, I think that there are a lot more whingers (whiners to my US sensibility) in Australia - it's always "not fair" in their minds because everything should be fair all the time but because it isn't, they don't need to be and then starts the vicious cycle.  There just seems to be always something to complain about, some chip on somebody's shoulder that they need to make known to everyone.  The attitude transfers from thought to words to actions - I mean, have you ever met a complainer who was kind to people?   Hey, most Americans know that life is not actually fair and that it's best to just go with the flow.  Do unto others as you would have them do unto you and all that jazz.  I learned a lot of good things being a girl scout and that was one of them, for sure.

I'm thinking about bringing my own portable stool next time I go anywhere to avoid being made to stand.   Or maybe I should just be smarmy Brooklyn girl "yo, I'm pregnant, get your ass out of that seat......."

I'm just thankful that my husband is well brought up (many thanks to his no nonsense mom), but I do think that they should do something about the national anthem..................