Are you struggling financially, on a low income or stressed about affording parking due to the significant increases?
If you have a Low Income Health Care Card (LIHC), you are entitled to support available from the ANU and the government. This list compiles the support services available to LIHC card holders.
A LIHC is used to prove financial struggle. It is a simple process and applications typically take about 30 days to process. Instructions on how to apply for a LIHC can be found here.
To be eligible for a LIHC you must:
Make less than $783 a week.
Be 19 or older (Under 19 eligibility is possible if you’re deemed independent or eligible for Family Tax Benefit).
Be an Australian Citizen or Permanent Resident (some visas are accepted — check here).
ANU INITIATIVES
(For some reason, you must be a domestic undergrad student to access any of this. Ridiculous.)
Students can apply for ANU initiatives here. They include:
Free student life surface parking permit at ANU
$150 textbook grant a semester
$150 student support grant a semester
Free 12 months ANU Sport membership
Free Griffin Hall membership (off-campus students)
Access to Community Connect Food Relief
GOVERNMENT INITIATIVES
Free Ambulances
Free public transport off-peak: on weekdays from 9:00 am to 4:30 pm, after 6:00 pm, and all day on weekends and public holidays
100 per cent off the registration fees of your motor vehicle registration (roughly 50-60 per cent of the total amount)
Greater access to bulk-billed GPs
Access to Canberra Health Services Public Dental
$200 spectacles subsidy from participating optometrists
Access to concession rate co-payments for PBS scheduled medications ($7.70 instead of the usual $31.60 maximum cost)
PBS Safety Net reduced to $277 from the regular $1,694 (this is how much you pay for PBS medications). After you’ve spent $277 with a LIHC — further PBS medication is 100% free.
THIRD-PARTY INITIATIVES
Concession fares for Neuron scooters
P.S.
Services Australia will give you a physical card — it is made from paper. You can access a digital card from the Centrelink App.
Resources like the Community Connect Food Relief and Parking support are likely limited, so bear this in mind if applying without genuine need.
Where will you be in ten years?
The hands of the clock drag you from one moment to the next.
Are things going to get better? Are things going to get worse?
Time looks out and demands an answer.
But you don’t know what to say.
Sometimes, it feels like the world is going to end. It feels like it’s all too much, and there’s nothing you can do. But then, there’s this moment, this moment when you see your friends in a show that they’ve been working on for so long. The show finishes, and you see them up on stage with a look of supreme joy and accomplishment. And when you see that – anytime something like that happens – you can’t help but feel like things are going to get better.
And then, there’s this moment when you go to the endpoint and see someone you love cross the finish line minutes before the cutoff. They collapse into their teammate’s arms in tears of joy and disbelief and exhaustion. And when you see that, and when you start to feel that warmth which spreads from your chest to your entire body, and when your jaw starts to hurt a little from smiling and your hands start to ache from clapping – anytime something like that happens – you can’t help but feel like things are going to get better.
But get better for how long?
One day, you’re not going to wake up. One day, you will be bones rotting under the soil or ashes turning in the wind. One day, you simply won’t be here. But you still will have been here. So, the question becomes, did the time you spent up until the day that you died, did it mean anything at all? You can hope that your life amounts to something. That you being here somehow made the world a better place.
But hope is a terrible, empty thing.
There is no security in hope. Hope doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be able to buy a house or find the time to tell someone that you love them.
‘I hope that I’ll be happy in 10 years.’
‘I hope that they know how much they mean to me.’
‘I hope that it’ll all be okay.’
Hope is never enough, but perhaps it’s a start.
What would the opposite of hope be? Would it be despair? No doubt despair is horrible, but it’s not empty. To despair is to know that all is lost, while to hope is only to wish that nothing is. Regret? Perhaps regret finds itself more at home with hope than despair does. After all, both deal in imagined pasts or futures.
‘I regret what I said. I regret what I said, but I can’t help but hope they know I didn’t mean it.’
Could you have done anything differently, or in every life are you cursed to walk the same streets and recite the same speeches and cry the same tears and throw up in the same bathrooms and love the same people?
Hope is always the hope that something does or doesn’t happen or has or hasn’t happened. In other words, hope is only hope because it keeps the company of uncertainty. In the instance of despair, hope either vanishes or changes. It vanishes because it has been killed, or it changes because despair has given birth to a new hope, a hope that it was all a dream, or that things are going to be okay, or that things are going to get better. We are held over the abyss on a tightrope stretched between past and future, in a moment marked present, with very limited knowledge of both what lies ahead and what lies behind. Hope is perhaps the only thing that allows us to keep our balance.
To give up on hope is to give up on life itself. Hope is always a wish for things to be better. For the world to be a kinder place, for smiles to be shared and laughter to be heard louder and more often. We can never be entirely sure of the future, of what lies ahead. But we can always hope that what lies ahead will be better than what we have now.
In ten years, I hope that I’ll be happy. I hope that my loved ones will be happy. I hope that the world will be a better place.
Comments Off on ‘THE HOUSE’: ANU’S RESIDENTIAL HALLS AS A MICROCOSM OF PARLIAMENTARY ELITISM
‘Is there much of an upstairs-downstairs feel in Parliament House?’
‘Yeah, we’ve got people upstairs who have probably never been down to the basement… if I wanted people to take note, I’d stop delivering coffee and toilet paper.’
These are the words of Sandy McInerney, Logistics Manager of Parliament House’s underground ‘catacombs’, in conversation with Annabel Crabb in her 2017 docuseries The House. Offhand words in one twenty-second conversation of a three-hour documentary series, which amongst all those exploring the glory and intricacies of Parliament’s ‘upstairs’ rooms, were the ones that lingered in my mind.
Parliament is a living, breathing organism of democracy, of high-level thinking, of the most important people in Australia. But McInerney’s words starkly remind us that no well-pressed suit, nor feet on immaculately steamed red and green carpet, exempt our high-calibre Parliamentarians from their human needs.
It does, however, seemingly exempt them from having to fulfil these needs themselves.
Our most important figures simply float through the halls of Parliament unaffected by such lowly considerations as where to buy their next coffee, or whether the toilet will be clean for them to use. They take blissful baths in the upstairs glory of The House, while a hidden workforce who ‘rarely sees the light of day’ weaves its way through an underground road and tunnel network, ensuring the functionality and comfort of Parliament; it’s just part of the job. The structural hierarchy – the dichotomy between the presentable and the obscured, the up and the down, the fore- and background – is built into the building itself, and subsequently built into parliamentary culture. This culture only works to perpetuate complex notions of ‘upper’ and ‘lower’ that pervade public reality: if the physical manifestation of Australian freedom and justice, representing the views and interests of the Australian people, is so plainly hierarchised, how can we expect society’s culture to reflect or embody anything else?
As I watch the flag fly atop Parliament’s glistening roof from just down the street, I contemplate the people I’m surrounded by, studying at Australia’s National University. I’ve met many a person in my eight months on campus who I could confidently say will sit in Parliament in twenty years. ANU graduates ‘go on to become leaders in government.’ I’m decidedly nestled in a culture that is fostering the minds that will fill the rooms of Parliament soon enough, and who similarly have their day-to-day needs managed in a basement that they will likely never lay eyes on.
My realisation, then, was that these future parliamentarians are, given the immense population of fellow first-year students living on campus, living their day-to-day lives now in much the same dynamic.
When I moved to Canberra, one of the biggest shocks to my system was learning that the kitchens, the bathrooms, the dining areas, and everything short of the individual rooms (unless you’re a Johns resident, if I’m to disseminate frivolous rumours) of my residential hall got cleaned not by those that used it, but by cleaning staff who have nothing to do with the dirtying of these spaces. Clogged sinks filled to the brim with ominous soup turned to sparkling silver overnight. Abandoned pots and pans and knives and forks left strewn across benches after the 7pm rush disappeared eventually. Moulding food was swept away when it got too apparent that its owner was probably not coming back for it.
I couldn’t believe it – I’d gone from being a nineteen-year-old who, despite her freeloading at home, had some semblance of responsibility for cleanliness, to a twenty-year-old who could ultimately leave whatever mess she’d like with very limited real consequences, despite likely dirty looks from others trying to use the stoves.
While having cleaning staff in itself is by no means condemnable, it highlights a crucial element of residential hall existence – that there is a certain, in-built element to this lifestyle that places our education and frankly, in many cases, our exercise of privilege in attending university, above our need to take responsibility for our everyday existence. We are being implicitly told that our intelligence and our ability to pay to live on campus – or, more commonly, to be paid for – places us above the need to engage with the mundane aspects of adult living, particularly for those living in catered residences. In this respect, we are young parliamentarians in more ways than being students of politics and law: living as if we are too important to change a toilet roll.
So many of us wouldn’t know the names of the people who mop our floors for us, and no matter how clean we keep our spaces, we therefore play a part in being the upstairs residents who would take most note of our cleaning staff if they stopped filling the paper towel dispensers and wiping the desks we study on. We can beg the question of whether living in residences, being fed and cleaned for, prepares us for the ‘real world’, but the cold truth is that, for many people, it sure does. Their real world will become the professionalised version: a workplace where they are cushioned by assurance that they need not lift a finger to feel cared for and have not since their first day at college. They will not see the insides of a maintenance cupboard nor the basement of whichever sunlit office they work in and will learn that this is what they worked for: to have the less palatable requirements of comfortable existence offloaded onto someone else.
The wake-up call here is not to drop out of college and start a commune, by any means. This lifestyle gives so many people the opportunities to pursue elements of independent living and study that they otherwise never would have dreamt possible. What lingers in my mind, though, is that this way of living is not as natural or normal as it can begin to feel when immersed in the insularity of it all. Hierarchy does not sit well in houses of any description, yet Australia’s most important House has it coursing through its veins; food for discomforting thought.
The wake-up call is, instead, to thank your cleaners, next time you see them; they are the people who underpin the lifestyle we’re lucky enough to lead, and there will never come a fictitiously constructed hierarchy that changes that.
On the night of the 1st of September, a category 2 cyclone hit Melbourne. I was alone in my parent’s house, lying high and awake in my childhood bed. Checking my notes app the next day, I noticed that I’d written something.
“It’s two forty-five in the morning. I’m alone in my childhood home, and I’m a little scared.”
I used to love storms. I still do, at least on an intellectual level. There’s something empowering about the natural world, and the quiet strength of our buildings withstanding a battering. But it’s been three years since I was in Melbourne for a proper storm, and I’m not used to them anymore. Melbourne isn’t entirely home anymore.
The storm, and my reaction to it, cemented a realisation that’s been dawning on me for some time; I’m getting older. I’m not the same Henry as I was in first year. When I first moved to Canberra, I was a fresh-faced (albeit hirsute) eighteen-year-old. There were endless streams of new people to meet, and I had complete freedom for the first time in my life. As these years went on, Canberra became home. Daley Road became home. I don’t know when Canberra became home, though I know that it is. But now, I’m about to turn twenty-one, and I’m preparing to leave this leafy home. Moving out of Daley Road feels like I’m moving into a new phase. I’m on the precipice of adulthood, and I’d be lying if that wasn’t daunting.
Canberra is a transitory place. Most of us never plan to stay here forever, though many of us will. As students in Canberra, we live a quasi-nomadic life. Our friends are from all over, and there’s endless trips to someone’s hometown that can be made. Since moving to Canberra, I’ve spent more time in Sydney than I ever thought I would. I’ve become familiar with a smorgasbord of small towns —places I didn’t even know existed when I decided to leave Melbourne.
Just like Canberra, being college-age is transitory. For the past three years, my identity has been in constant flux. Every possible experience is handed to you on a platter. I’ve attended talks at embassies immediately after coordinating some of the Engineering School’s brightest minds to make a bong. That’s the beauty of early adulthood. It’s a period of constant discovery. Of constant change, excitement, and experimentation. There’s a reason you don’t see many 40 year olds packing into the forests near Pialligo for a doof. After a while, the chaos becomes disorienting. I’m aware it’s bizarre that I’m writing this sentence but nevertheless, I’m getting old.
Adulthood excites me. A while back, I had a conversation with one of my best friends. Being from Melbourne, we’re both rarities in our Sydneysider friendship group. Driving along Hoddle Street in Melbourne, on our way to a day of unnecessarily expensive sandwiches and thrifting in Fitzroy, he asked me whether I’d rather get older or get younger and redo my childhood. I generally avoid existential crises before lunchtime, but this dilemma gripped me.
I didn’t have a good answer at the time, but I can now confidently say that adulthood excites me more than youth. Stability is more thrilling to me than chaos. I think that makes me boring and I think that’s what scares me the most. I was asked once if I’d prefer to be happy or interesting. At the time I said interesting. But I can’t stand by that answer anymore. I would rather be happy and simple.
The tragedy of youth is that it ends. We can only be interesting for so long, at some point, normalcy comes knocking. What is daunting to me now is that I know I’ll open the door. As I attend my last college events, as I go to house inspections and fill out rental applications, as I apply for APS and paralegal jobs, as I leave hospo behind, I am walking down the corridor. I don’t know if I’m ready to open the door, but that doesn’t matter. I’ll have to turn the knob anyway.
Comments Off on “Babe, we have to hang out!”: Sedating loneliness with an Instagram comment
When I reflect on the dizzying fact that it’s been two years since graduating high school, off the back of a bizarre late adolescent experience, floating in 5km bubbles of government-permitted social engagement and filtering my life through a cycle of apps to make my tortured seventeen-year-old existence look like a dream, I have to wonder: how well do I know the people I graduated with? Are we friends? Would I call them my friend, but would they then smile awkwardly at the proposition?
Does an Instagram comment make someone my friend?
The results are in: we’re the loneliest age group in Australia. According to the Melbourne Institute’s Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Report, 24.8% of Australians aged 15–24 ‘often feel very lonely’. This statistic rose steadily in the twenty years between 2001 and 2021 from 18.5% (some of the lowest rates of loneliness of any age group) to almost 25% (the very highest rates among all age groups).
A spike in strong responses in 2020 shows us that the pandemic was not guiltless in this rise, and rightly so. We’re now left with a generation of 15 to 24-year-olds who spent their most formative years reliant on digitised relationships to maintain a sense of connection. As much as it sounds like a jab delivered down the nose of a disgruntled grandparent at family Christmas, it’s our reality.
It’s easy to turn to the most apparent cause of this resounding sentiment of loneliness to explain the phenomenon. Many teenagers, particularly in metropolitan Melbourne and Sydney, spent days on end seeing only the faces of their family and neighbours, hearing their friends’ voices only through FaceTime or grainy, mid-Among Us game Discord conversations (the darkest of dark times). Physical isolation is obviously conducive to immense loneliness, only worsened by the fatigue inherent to the need to make a consistent effort to connect when natural, passive connection is taken away. Already, today’s Australian twenty-something-year-olds have developed a perception of their own connectedness and loneliness — that they are perpetually connected, and immune to isolation — completely distinct from that of our predecessors.
But there’s an underappreciated phenomenon that permeates our social lives, and one which throws our certainty in our connectedness to others into limbo: the ‘D tier’ friendship, the serial commenter yet frequent brush-paster in the street, the capitalised text conversationalist yet quietly awkward in-person small-talker. The digitisation of our relationships has created a new force of loneliness: a false sense of closeness with those whose lives we observe online.
Our reliance on social media is both beautiful and disastrous. I cherish that a confessional second-account story post allows me access to the most complex inner thoughts of someone I talked to in one food tech practical in Year 9 and never spoke to again. I cherish that they likely have the most elementary knowledge of not only my life but, quite frankly, who on Earth I am at all. I cherish that I have never once had to wonder what almost every person I shared my high school graduation with is up to these days, because their beautifully curated spring photo dumps have comprehensively informed me of their new smoking habit, their well-highlighted hair, their somehow-prevailing friendship with the girl they claimed to despise at 13, and their proudly boasted techno expertise. I know what they’re doing. They know what I’m doing. We know each other, quite surely.
But upon recent trips home and circumstantial run-ins with high school semi-friends, I’ve become less sure. I haven’t spoken to them for two whole years, and upon bumping into them, have had very little beyond pleasantries to discuss. I’m not even sure what degree they do, or whether they study at all. I walk away with the humbling realisation that they might just be more than their highlights, hair-related or otherwise, and we might, in fact, no longer be friends. And for a moment, I feel lonely: how many of the people I remember as friends are actually strangers, whose Instagram stories just flash over my screen?
It is this illusion of closeness we gain from our almost-parasocial ties to old acquaintances that makes pangs of loneliness sting all the harsher. We have collectively constructed a culture where our connections are governed by brief online interactions — over-enthusiastic comments left on an artfully angled selfie in a Macbook photobooth tab, floating red hearts deposited into the like bank of a carousel post of cocktails — and for as long as they continue, how could we ever be lonely? When hundreds of people watch your life unfold, how could you possibly claim to be alone? But when these grounding interactions with the people I so confidently and dismissively label friends strike fear into my heart that perhaps having an active audience doesn’t make one connected, I unbalance, and fall unceremoniously off my (Instagrammable) high horse into a state of miserable, albeit dramatised, solitude.
There are then two ways for a young person with social media presence to be lonely. Conventional loneliness will never disappear; humans are fated to feel isolated, misunderstood, or alone, despite being surrounded by people, at some point or another. The difference for our generation, however, is that we have unfettered access to a fast-release sedative to this type of isolation, which we can tap into at leisure: online validation!
Feeling miserable at the state of your friendships or popularity? Post about it! Scroll your tagged posts! Check that you do indeed consistently get more birthday messages on your Facebook timeline each year, even though that’s the most archaic and meaningless possible way to be wished happy birthday!
The comedown from the high of this digital reassurance, however, is where this secondary loneliness lies. By plugging into easy-access ‘connection’, exempting ourselves from the reflection and humility that comes with a bit of good old-fashioned loneliness, we stand to suffer much more from the wearing-off of what has become our favourite drug. In those moments when we realise that knowing what someone is doing does not give us insight into who they are, we learn that the isolation cure we’ve created not only fails but creates a new problem: the illusion that our connections are sounder than they are, and therefore that they don’t require maintenance. By letting friendships lie in empty promises of drinks in TikTok comments, we risk losing sight of the need to make good on intentions to make them worthwhile. We are lonelier for our blindness to the falsehood of Instagram friendship, and we’ll only continue to become more so in growing up, and apart, and realising that the immediate proximity and ease of connection that high school gifted us cannot be replaced by perfunctory online interactions.
Loneliness and social media go hand in hand to make the inherent uncertainty of being in your early twenties all the more complicated, obscuring reality with illusions of prevailing friendships from our early teens and ever-close friend groups with everything in common. When ruined, these illusions leave us vulnerable to a deeper sense of aloneness — one which can be rectified not through yet another online broadcast, but only through making good on all those hang-out-next-time-you’re-in-town messages.
As much as my grandparents like to tell me that we’ve lost touch with real human connection, we haven’t. We’ve made unfathomably good use of an unimaginable tool of connection, and even if we may lose sight of the forest for the trees of this connection by prioritising conceptual connection over reality, we can be empowered by social media to create and maintain friendships in real, tangible ways.
Text your high school friends and tell them you’d like to hang out. Comment on your distant mutual friends’ thirst trap that you’d like to hang out. Reply to your ex-best-friend’s story while drunk, tell them you miss them, and you’d like to hang out. And then hang out. The internet is always a lonely place, but the real world certainly isn’t.
After moving to Canberra for uni, I began to make many friends within the LGBTQ+ community, and have found myself in a predominantly queer friendship circle for the past three years. This openness of sexual proclivities was exciting and comforting to me; to know that my new home was a place that allowed my peers to express themselves. But four years into my university degree, I began to wonder why I wasn’t friends with, or couldn’t at least think of, any out-of-the-closet bisexual men, despite the amount of queer people and specifically bisexual women I know.
The Pew Research Centre in Australia found that of the LGBTQ+ community, bisexual men were the least likely to be out to those closest and most important to them, with only 12 percent of them being out. Although this number doesn’t necessarily represent the statistics at ANU or Canberra, it does align with my experiences. So why aren’t bisexual men coming out of the closet?
My preliminary and uninformed assumption was that there was a lack in emotional awareness or acceptance between men, and thus less support for men to come out in general. I imagined that particularly in the case of bisexual men, if you could ‘pass’ as straight throughout high school and university because of past or current female partners, there would be less external pressure and questioning from your peers. There would also be less of a requirement to internally question your sexuality if you were participating in the socially accepted, heteronormative sexual expression. Why engage yourself with emotionally tumultuous questioning of sexual identity if you’re content in your heterosexual relationship? But of course, I realised that I may be forcing an unfair stereotype on men as emotionally stagnant or unsupportive to their peers. To figure this doozy out, I would have to do research.
Considering I wasn’t in a position to ask a bisexual man on the matter, I researched whether my assumptions had a factual basis. Dr. Eric Schrimshaw at Columbia University did a study with 203 closeted bisexual men over the age of 18 to determine why they were afraid or unwilling to ‘come out’. They all varied in their socio-economic status, ethnic backgrounds, and levels of education, but they had all had a same-sex sexual encounter within the past year.
The study immediately negated my previous assumption regarding a potential internal questioning — these men were not confused about their sexuality. Their hesitations about stepping out of the closet revolved around stigma, ridicule, and the fear of being outed to those they didn’t want to know. It also highlighted the additional sub-cultural pressures that Black and Latino men faced which was keeping them closeted. With a highly multicultural demographic in Australia, we can acknowledge there are additional cultural expectations and implications in the ‘coming out’ process to non-anglo ethnicities prevalent in our country. Although this study was done in the United States, we can see how these ramifications may apply to groups of bisexual men in Australia.
However, a major factor which affected many bisexual men took me by surprise. Most of these men affirmed a fear of being left by their female partners because of previous same-sex actions or attractions. “Being attracted to men negates masculinity in the eyes of a shit ton of women” was an unfortunate quote associated with the Columbia study.
Bisexual men and women may face this particular fear of rejection from their partners, regardless of either’s gender, but bisexual women may experience this fear with slight altercation.
As my other bi women friends have agreed, my attraction towards women has predominantly been fetishised by, or is at least attractive to, straight men. Under some circumstances, there was more concern (and likelihood) that my bisexuality was not going to be seen as legitimate by a male partner, rather than a fear of disapproval or disgust from them. But in contrast, the most nonchalant prejudice towards my bisexual friends, and myself, accumulate from interactions with gay or lesbian peers for not being ‘gay enough’, or being under the adjacent assumption that the young bisexual woman is going through a ‘phase’. “You’ll be straight in 10 years,” are comments one may hear, and may not necessarily be untrue. Although there is nothing wrong in a change of sexual identity down the track, having your sexuality renounced once you proclaim it is harmful, even when it’s off-handed comments from within one’s own community. In my eyes, this stems from queer women having to ‘earn’ the partial or full removal of men from their sexual landscape, considering that the only viewing of women’s sexuality throughout recent history has been from a veneer only installed by and for the gratification of men. However, conscious or unconscious dismissal of sexuality is not a reaction bisexual women alone face — it extends to bisexual men and others of the LGBTQ+ community.
With similar fears between bisexual folk, there are some factors which may allow for the sexual liberation of bisexual women, who are more likely to come out. The two that we have inferred are: potentially better emotional support networks, and the reduced harm which comes from a man fetishising a sexually-expanded woman (or at least the idea of a sexually open woman). Some contributing factors which might weigh on men more than women include the tenacious hold that the gendered-stereotype of ‘masculinity’ has on sexuality, and the lack of representation of bisexual men in literature, on screen and as public role models. Despite the rise in ‘queer baiting’ – the incorporation of apparent queer characters or culture in media to appeal to gay audiences – there aren’t many out bisexual men.
Our differences may be surmised to bisexual men being perceived as ‘too gay’, for their partners or for modern media, and bisexual women being perceived as ‘too straight’. For bisexual women, there is an unrighteous safeguard in being considered as less visibly queer, particularly under certain situations where non-heteronormativity may get you into trouble. Although the invalidation from this guise is bitter, and can be detrimental to one’s mental health when over-lived, it may be a different weight to the invalidation of bisexual men only being seen as gay.
I could continue to highlight studies which unequivocally detail the importance of being out and accepted within your community (whether it’s big or small), however, in reality, each individual holds their own importance towards their degree of sexual expression. When there’s a lack of bisexual men who feel comfortable in coming out because of potential stigma, there becomes less support networks, whether explicit or not, for those men who do want to come out. There are potential harms to being closeted, including poor mental health, increased levels of depression and anxiety, and more internalised homophobia. However, I can’t consider why in our current day and age, and in a more culturally accepting part of the world, there is a requirement to come out. I would contest that the culture at ANU, at least from my perspective, is progressive enough that one’s sexuality is accepted whether flown proud in the sky or kept for safe-keeping in your intimate circle. It is not everyone’s desire to be explicit in their sexual preferences, which may be the reason as to why I don’t know many bisexual men, rather than there being a distinct cultural inhibitor at ANU. Bisexual men do not owe it to anybody to come out, even if it aids in support and comradery for their fellow queer male friends. However, it is important for us to cross-examine whether the lack of out bisexual men is due to a genuine choice from the individual or because of an unfortunate reception, especially from their close women-relationships.
Because ANU is a relatively open LGBTQ+ community, unharmful groups of people, queer or not, openly discuss and ‘out’ their friends to a wider circle which is presumed to be a safe and warm environment that will hold such news. This ultimately takes the power away from the individual who may not want their proclivities to be known, even if they are consciously aware that their environment is accepting. I consider this a forgotten practice in an open-community, and although there is no intent of harm from this practice, it may be another reason as to why bisexual men aren’t coming out.
Comments Off on “What if you just called Taylor up?” (On your Nokia 2660 Flip Phone)
It’s safe to say that most of Gen Z would tell you that too much screen time has in one way or another badly affected their life. Whether it’s doom-scrolling on TikTok rather than doing your essay or staying up until 2am watching YouTube video essays on the end of James Charles’ career, most of us have been in the firing line of an over-consumption of media, where we felt no impulse but to consume. To rid themselves of their dopamine addiction, many of my peers have considered either quitting social media, un-downloading the apps from their smartphone or completely converting to a dumbphone. I opted for the latter.
For the past one and a half months I have been somehow surviving in this day and age with a Nokia 2660 Flip Phone (in the colour skylight blue). My transition to the dumb phone wasn’t entirely intentional. At the start of this year I had an exchange program lined up, and prior to these travels I was going through a rough patch of immense stress and anxiety. Some of the stress was out of my control, but how I was dealing with it — or not dealing with it — was through distractions delivered via Instagram reels and Youtube videos. I decided that I would quit cold turkey when I came back Down Under in the second half of the year. I didn’t initially deliver on the promise, but after my phone was stolen in Lisbon and my old iPhone SE broke down, the previously-purchased flip phone became a godsend considering my post-Euro-travel bank account. So, nearly two months in, what is life actually like with a flip phone?
The transition to a dumbphone was surprisingly easy. The old habit of being on a phone for texting or other convenience reasons was forgotten, and the mental health perks to this new way of life, particularly being less consistently stimulated, became apparent. I never missed the feeling of being technologically stimulated, but for the first few weeks it did feel irregular. My levels of stress and anxiety decreased as there was no Facebook to check when waiting for the bus, or Messenger group chats to respond to when I became uncomfortable with the silence.
Rather, these pauses when on-the-go became enjoyable and are, what I believe to be, a catalyst to the less anxiety-ridden mentality where my feelings and thoughts are now welcomed. As an overthinker, it initially seems daunting to not have a diversion from your thoughts, but the opposite has been the case for me. The more time you have to think, the less extraneous thinking you do. As stereotypical as it may sound, it is true that by disconnecting from the outlet of intangible media, the more tenacious your connection to the tangible environment around you.
These benefits to my mental health may be of no surprise to you, but what are the downsides?
The biggest initial implication and consequence of this new lifestyle was, and continues to be, having no instant music. Discovering and listening to music has always been a major source of joy and comfort for me, and I could easily consider this as a core facet of my identity. I had never seen my consumption of music to be a part of the problem, but after not having this accessible listening when driving to work, on my way to uni, or when getting ready, it became clear that it too was an unnecessary inhibitor for my quietude. My habit of always listening to music was preventing me from simply existing without being prompted by a ‘mood’ or ‘genre’ from an artist or album. Although I still occasionally listen to music whilst cleaning the kitchen, the practice has become purposeful rather than habitual.
However, the main inconveniences of the flip phone are the day-to-day services which one naturally has access to on an advanced device. There are of course small daily tasks that are inconvenient, such as not being able to respond to uni emails on-the-go or not being able to order through the QR code at cafes. A more difficult hurdle is no longer being able to use e-banking and instantly transfer money, resulting in a lot of calls and extra budgeting. On the brightside, being extra conscious of my daily spending account has helped me save from overspending.
Many of these interactions with in-charge-personnel, including the ANU, affirmed a distinct cultural assumption that one is always accessible; how else could we function without technology? Everyone assumed I had a smartphone, and not everything was resolvable without one. A concern became apparent; a future where I am dependent on and expected to own a piece of equipment which must be superseded every few years, seemed innately bitter and unsustainable for the societal or autonomous condition.
In regards to those around me, the biggest complaint has been the texting issue. It is clear that my dumbphone (which is without WhatsApp or Messenger) has become more painful to my peers than to myself. However, thanks to my laptop it became habitual to message friends through these apps when I could, and ‘sign-off’ when I was on foot; if they needed me they would text me and expect a call back (typing on a numerically-padded buttons is painful for the sender and receiver).
Yet over time, this felt like a cop-out. As a student, my laptop is quite accessible, and the amount I check Messenger and WhatsApp has increased since my downgrade. My screen time on streaming services such as Netflix and Binge, as well as YouTube (which I am a sucker for) also increased. Additionally, although my time on social media has significantly decreased, I am still checking Instagram and Facebook once a day. The purpose of my dumbphone was to have less distractions in my life and make time for means of livelihood which I actually enjoyed. My continued usage of such media initially frustrated me – why couldn’t I quit cold-turkey?
However, I have concluded that fully abstaining from any form of instant-media is not a pragmatic reality. Technological media is and will continue to be a part of our lives regardless of our wishes. Realistically, I have reached my goal of less anxiety and stress, and I have spent more of my time on self-fulfilling hobbies. The appeal for this new way of life with less instant-media surprisingly turned out to be rooted in a new ease of the day-to-day; where accessibility to distractions in moments of silence has not been an option. This removal has made me more conscious of my actions when consuming any form of media, instant or not.
All our lives now revolve around convenience, from smart e-banking, to quick international messaging, to the sharing of thoughts and feelings through a TikTok at the touch of a button. Our culture is being moulded to slot into this new way of life, and when it sets in, I’m unsure as to whether living with a dumbphone would be possible in the next 10 years or so. But these few weeks have also affirmed that the rising of a more technologically-interconnected lifestyle is not a framework leaving us anytime soon, nor is it something we can resist. We must learn how to balance this technical aspect of life without suffering from its imposition.
I left behind my smartphone because I had an addiction or, at the least, a dependency on social media. This switch in my life is something I am quite grateful for and is not something I am considering changing in the foreseeable future. However, given the integration and quick access of technological-media from many avenues, it’s safe to say that converting to a dumbphone will not curb your social media or dopamine addiction, nor is it sustainable. But it may be a good place to start.
Comments Off on Who Does Sex Testing Really Protect?
The recent vicious campaign of harassment against Algerian boxer Imane Khelif has been a case study in predictable outcomes: the gender-critical movement was always going to become a burden, not just for transgender people, but for all women who fail to neatly slot into the ever-shifting goalposts of who can be a woman.
Imane Khelif mostly flew under the radar during the 2024 Summer Olympics, until Italian boxer Angela Carini abandoned their group of 16 fight after only 46 seconds, saying the blows she received from Khelif were the hardest she had received in her life. Following this, it was widely reported that in 2023, Khelif and another boxer, Taiwanese Lin Yu-Ting, had been disqualified from the boxing World Championships by the International Boxing Association (IBA) for failing an unspecified ‘gender test’. This prompted a wave of outrage, led by tragically public figures like JK Rowling, Elon Musk, and Logan Paul.
It’s important to note, off the bat, that these tests conducted by the IBA were part of a pattern of illegal and unprofessional conduct that has plagued the organisation for years. So too was the decision to disqualify Khelif and Lin from the 2023 championships: having competed in competitions under IBA governance since 2018, Khelif was taken out in the middle of the tournament and forced to undergo an unspecified ‘gender test’ three days after she beat previously undefeated Russian boxer Azalia Amineva. As the International Olympic Committee (IOC) put it in a statement released after Khelif’s 46-second victory, their disqualification was “contrary to good governance,” and undertaken “without any proper procedure.” The IBA has also, in recent years, come under intense scrutiny for President Umar Kremlev’s links with Vladimir Putin, and was recently derecognised by the IOC for “lack of financial transparency,” including significant sponsorship it receives from Russian energy firm Gazprom.
To be clear, Khelif and Lin are not transgender. There is no reliable evidence to suggest they have XY chromosomes, or higher than average testosterone, or any intersex trait. But even if they are intersex, and even if those traits do give them a demonstrable advantage, why should they be disqualified?
Fairness in an unfair playing field
Victor Wembanyama, the tallest athlete at the Paris Games, is 7’3”. He undeniably has an advantage when he plays basketball. Simone Biles can jump twelve feet in the air. Nearly every single outstanding athlete has some sort of physical edge which they got through luck, not training, and in most cases they are praised for it. It goes against the core of sporting spirit to ask athletes to either withdraw or suppress any genetic advantage they might have in order to uphold this myth of a ‘level playing field’. But not, apparently, if you’re intersex. Not if you’re trans.
The problem with sex testing is that you can’t test for sex. Any proposed defining feature of ‘biological sex’ is subject to exceptions that seem to disprove the rule. It’s often said that biological sex is defined by chromosomes, but this isn’t universally true; take, for instance, women with complete androgen insensitivity, who usually have ‘male levels’ of testosterone and XY chromosomes. By this standard of sex testing, these people are male, even though they have entirely female external sexual characteristics, and no difference in strength conferred on them by their testosterone levels, because their body doesn’t process it.
In the absence of reliable and consistent sex tests, from 2000 to 2011, the IOC adopted a policy of “suspicion based testing” where only women whose appearance or sporting achievement were ‘suspicious’ were subject to medical evaluations. This system was criticised for the disproportionate scrutiny it placed on women of colour, since the normative definition of typical femaleness that ‘suspicious’ athletes were compared to was based on a Western standard. Regardless of hormone levels or chromosomes, women of colour, in particular Black women, are often stereotyped as masculine, or as outside femininity, in the same pattern of historical dehumanisation that was used as a justification for slavery and segregation.
What, then, is the purpose of sex testing? To maintain fairness in a playing field that has never been fair? To protect women’s safety? But women who don’t conform to an acceptable standard of Western femininity are not protected. Instead, they are subjected to invasive examinations and interrogations that seem to set out, in brutal detail, who is subject to principles of bodily autonomy and privacy — and who is not.
I don’t think the backlash to Khelif and Lin comes from a desire to uphold any principle of safety or fairness; it comes from a general unwillingness to confront the inherent failure of sex-segregated sports in the first place. Sex, as it is treated in sport, is binary and immutable. In reality, it isn’t. So why does this unwillingness persist, if the exclusion of trans and intersex people doesn’t protect anyone?
To answer this, I would like to propose an amendment to the question: what we should be asking is not who systems of regulating sex protect, but what. This is not a scientific divide; it is a political one.
Natural(ised) Labour
It all comes down to what parts of ‘being a woman’ are seen as natural, and what parts aren’t. Scholar Silvia Federici, in her 1974 essay ‘Wages Against Housework’ writes that domestic labour is not only “ imposed on women” but “transformed into a natural attribute of our female physique and personality, an internal need, an aspiration, supposedly coming from the depth of our female character.” Times have changed since Federici wrote that essay, but less than we like to think. Even in straight households where women are the primary income-earners, they still tend to do most of the housework.
This unpaid labour, Federici argues, is enabled by the naturalisation of the labour that women perform. In simpler terms, the idea of biological ‘womanhood’, as it is constructed under capitalism, is a tool used to justify and perpetuate the expectation that women should provide care, nurturing, and domestic work without compensation. This construction frames these tasks as inherent to biology rather than as work that should be valued and paid for. By making this labour invisible, capitalism ensures that it remains outside the formal economy, thus maintaining a supply of free labour essential for the reproduction of the workforce.
Make no mistake: transgender and intersex people pose a real problem to this picture. This is why when women fall outside Western ideals of womanhood, they must be scapegoated as criminals or medical outliers, lest the category of ‘woman’ as an economic position be delegitimized. If variations in sexual characteristics are treated as normal, then the categorisation of ‘woman’ is muddied; there is no clear grouping that can be used to naturalise women’s oppression. Inclusion and acceptance of transgender people creates a similar threat to essentialist views of sex. If someone categorised as a man can genuinely improve their life by becoming a woman, then the immutability of sex is called into question. So too is male superiority, and the idea of an inherent ‘nature’ based on physical characteristics.
All this to say that the brutal online persecution of Khelif and Lin, two women who have done nothing except fail to appeal to Western standards of femininity, should highlight for everyone how the fight for transgender and intersex liberation affects us all. In some ways, I’m dissatisfied with the focus my argument has taken on intersex athletes, for the simple reason that the International Boxing Association has not presented any evidence that Khelif or Lin are intersex, or have high testosterone, or any other advantage the IBA links to their sexual characteristics.
From the beginning, this discourse has not actually been about the right of intersex athletes to compete. It has been the product of an increasingly radicalised right-wing movement that cannot accept the public existence of anyone who, in their mind, insufficiently performs femininity, whether because they are trans, or because they are too muscular, or too tall, or too brown. Standing up for people who don’t fit into the popular ideal of womanhood is not a moral issue; it is a fight we are all materially invested in.
Of the controversy surrounding her performance, Khelif has called for the harassment to stop. “It can destroy people,” she said in an interview. “It can kill people’s thoughts, spirit and mind. It can divide people.”
She is right. Online, and in right-wing media outlets, a good deal of the discussion surrounding Khelif and Lin’s participation has been nauseating to read. These responses have been a frightening indictment of the current state of discourse around trans people, and of the anger that can be elicited at the moment by the mere possibility of someone being a transgender woman.
Khelif won what may well be the last gold medal in the women’s welterweight category; boxing is not scheduled to appear in the 2028 Games, following the deregistration of the IBA. The gold medal match, attended by many members of the French Algerian diaspora, was packed with flag-clad supporters. After the winner was announced, Khelif was lifted on her coach’s shoulders and brought around a packed arena that was cheering her name.
I think there is hope in this picture. The tide will eventually turn. While undoubtedly a disturbing episode of online discourse, this saga has also brought a lot of the contradictions contained in the ‘gender critical’ movement into the limelight. I think it’s also illustrated for a lot of people how the anti-trans movement will only ever continue to shift the goalposts on who can be a woman in their book, and how its goal has never really been women’s liberation. In amongst the fearmongering, a lot of people have been rightfully praising Khelif’s remarkable perseverance and grace. The cracks in the gender-critical narrative are showing. Time to push back.
Comments Off on Bridging the Generational Gap: How to Talk to Your Grandparents About Climate Change
Okay, maybe it’s not your grandparents. But Grandma sharing climate misinformation plastered over a deep-fried minion meme or pixelated sunset picture on Facebook has a certain je-ne-sais-quoi, don’t you think?
In our ever-evolving world, climate change stands out as one of the most pressing challenges of our time. Engaging in dialogue about it can be daunting and potentially very stressful for many of us – especially with our families.
Science hesitancy exists in all demographics, but its zeitgeist is often considered older individuals. Griffith University’s Climate Action Survey from 2022 supports this, showing that individuals of higher age and lower education are more likely to deny climate change. We can’t control the environment we mature in or the quality of education available to us; these are not value statements about someone’s character or intelligence.
And these aren’t the only factors that contribute to this over-representation. Further aspects include media bias, personal values, religious beliefs, and political affiliations. Understanding every nuance of climate scepticism is impossible, but recognising potentially contributing elements can help us better engage with others.
The Acceleration of Change
Bias is everywhere. Many of us who grew up in the digital age expect media bias and seek multiple perspectives on a topic to form our opinions. However, the same magnitude of information was not readily available before the internet and the information age.
Ray Kurzweil wrote in 2001 about the accelerating rate of change: “An analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense ‘intuitive linear’ view. So, we won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century — it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today’s rate).”
Keeping up with increasingly rapid changes around us is difficult, if not impossible. Now, imagine that you’ve seen the first man on the moon and the invention of the computer, internet, car, phone, cell phone, and smartphone all within your lifetime. It’s hard to identify legitimacy when the world whizzes past so quickly.
Granddad might be adapting well to having a smartphone, but that doesn’t automatically give him the skills to sift the wheat from the chaff in the internet age. And that’s okay. He probably showed you how to use a spoon; perhaps it’s time to return the favour of patience.
Differences in experiences between generations can cause canyons between our worlds. Here are three facets where generational gaps may contribute to perspective differences.
Information sources
Research by market research company Flamingo for Reuters indicates that news habits vary significantly between generations, with older generations demonstrating far more loyalty to specific media corporations than younger generations.
Older generations typically stick to specific platforms of traditional news sources, such as newspapers and television. Before the rise of the internet, these sources were often trusted as primary channels for information dissemination.
As with all forms of information delivery, traditional news sources may be heavily politically or ideologically biased. A news source’s editorial stance or political leaning can significantly influence the information presented to the audience. Fidelity to a narrow range of news sources may impact the audience’s own worldview.
By contrast, the reduced loyalty of younger generations to traditional media allows access to a diverse range of perspectives. This does not safeguard younger individuals from misinformation, but varied exposure enables us to deconstruct our biases and construct our worldviews based on sound information. Media literacy and analytical skills are more important than ever when digesting information in the world of politically and ideologically driven interpretation, misinformation and disinformation.
Political or religious identity
Climate change has, unfortunately, become a polarising topic in many political and religious circles. Discussions around climate change often transcend scientific discourse and enter the domain of deeply rooted group affiliations. While political and religious identities are not generation-specific, differences in these values exist between family generations.
Our affiliations with political or religious ideologies profoundly influence how we perceive the world around us. When our identity or group affiliation becomes intertwined with an ideology, it significantly increases the likelihood that we, too, may adopt the same ideology.
Climate change discussions are just one example of how complex interactions between personal beliefs, values, and larger group identities can be. Age aside, it is difficult for people to question deeply held opinions, especially if doing so may risk social ostracism.
Emotional disconnection
The magnitude of climate change can be emotionally overwhelming. Many people have expressed sentiments like: “Well, I won’t be around for that, so I don’t need to worry about it.”
The enormity and complexity of climate change can cause us to disconnect from our emotions. A form of psychological self-preservation, it’s a brilliant coping strategy by our brains.
This detachment, while momentarily shielding us from the emotional weight of crisis, comes at a cost. It closes our eyes to the tangible effects of climate change that we are already experiencing. To protect us from discomfort, our minds hinder the sense of urgency needed for collective action. Recognising and addressing our psychological defence mechanisms is an individual’s responsibility, and we cannot force anyone else to do so. However, we can increase our awareness of such factors and approach conversations with empathy and care toward others’ psychological well being.
Engaging Empathetically
Open dialogue between diverse perspectives is crucial to bridging gaps to address the challenges of climate change. By engaging empathetically, we can create an environment where others are more likely to feel safe to be open and honest. Here are three points to encourage a comfortable space for discussions.
Start with shared values
At the core, who really wants koalas to go extinct, the Maldives to become uninhabitable, and the global economy to be destroyed? Most of us want a better, more secure future for coming generations, but we disagree on how to make that happen.
It’s not just about coal power vs solar power; it’s about livelihoods, homelands, ways of life and extinction events. Suppose we focus on the similarities of what we care about rather than what we disagree on. In that case, we can move on to discussing how to best protect what we all care about: a future to look forward to for ourselves and the coming generations.
Listen actively
People will have their nuanced concerns, but there are plenty of familiar talking points among climate change critics. Stephen R. Covey’s Habit 5 of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People summed up an effective way of establishing rapport well: “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.”
Listening actively indicates to others that their concerns are worthy of answers, whether they reject them or not. If you set the example of active listening, you might find a more receptive ear when it comes to your turn to speak.
Respect their experiences
It’s easy to assume that education is the key to changing peoples’ minds about climate science, but this isn’t necessarily true.
Understanding climate science is important for engaging in conversations about it, sure. But if someone is sceptical, reiterating something they don’t trust will only make them dig their heels into their pre-established ideas.
Grandparents have a wealth of life experience. Whether or not we share worldviews, they have forged their opinions through many years of experience. Rather than trying to educate them out of their views, seek to understand and respect their experiences. That way, we can pave the way for meaningful conversations that transcend our generational differences.
Conclusion
It is neither realistic nor ethical for us to try to mould the opinions of others to match our own. What we can do, however, is create a place for them to express their concerns without judgement or frustration and encourage them to think critically for themselves. Empathy and understanding are vital in bridging the gaps between us and our loved ones, be it generational, ideological, or something else entirely.
Climate change is a complex, global issue, and every generation’s involvement is essential. By starting these dialogues, we can hopefully share understandings and foster connections to build a better future together.
We may not undo the damage we have already done to the climate in our lifetimes, but our input is essential. As Doctor Minnie Joycelyn Elders, former United States Surgeon General, beautifully put it: “Society grows great when old men plant trees under whose shade they know they’ll never sit.”
Comments Off on Alea iacta est: a Tale of Two Rivers
When Caesar crossed the Rubicon with his legions, he set off a chain of events that led to the end of the ailing Roman Republic. A system that had stood for almost half a millennium was irrevocably damaged in less than five years. Washington, as any fan of Hamilton would know, sits on the Potomac River. When Trumpists crossed this river on the 6th of January 2021 did they set off a similar chain of events?
I would argue yes: both events led to further manipulation of the political system by the men at their heads and both accelerated a path towards liberal non-democracy: a state in which generally liberal views are contrasted against an undemocratic system.
Caesar, until his assassination, succeeded. The January 6 riots did not, at least in their original intention. Caesar and Trump are undeniably different figures, while both of them were or are incredibly rich individuals, the former was considerably more so compared to his peers than the latter. Caesar was the second most famous general of the Roman army when he crossed the Rubicon as well as a highly accomplished politician, the latter was famous for being a reality TV star with a slew of failed businesses. Caesar was the epitome of a political insider by this point in his career, Trump at least branded himself as an outsider. However, there are parallels between the two men at the hearts of these movements and the long-term impact of the events could trend in similar directions. Whether we care to admit it or not, both have loomed large on the stage of their times and both reshaped the political atmosphere in which they operated.
Many of us would, I think, agree that America as a democracy has failed or is failing, in a similar way to how the Roman Republic was on the brink when Caesar cast the die. The nation is one of only five that has some members of its judiciary subject to some form of election. In a number of states the highest state courts judges can be elected either directly or through a confirmation or retention election, where courts are supposed to be apolitical in order to impartially interpret the law, these courts are politicised by elections potentially endangering the rule of law. The individuals running the county’s elections are themselves elected politicians and the elections are scrutinised by partisans. Its highest judges are more akin to politicians rather than the impartial arbiters of the law as we expect our High Court justices to be in Australia. From the nation’s inception it has been possible to win a plurality in the popular vote in a presidential election while losing the election itself (this happened in 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000 and 2020). Not to mention that there are more ageing American politicians that need to learn how to say goodbye than there were Roman senators when Caesar’s civil war broke out.
And why, we ask, did these true patriots cross the Potomac? To prevent a reality TV star with a slew of defunct businesses turned leader of the free world with the most impeachments of a president in history from losing his new hobby to a man who ran on a platform of getting rid of him. Want to know why Caesar crossed the Rubicon with his legions? Because his political opponents were removing him from office and if he came without an army, he would surely be prosecuted for crimes committed while consul years earlier. I wonder who now is being prosecuted for crimes committed in office.
After his victory over Pompey, Caesar championed the political accession of his supporters, cementing his influence in the Senate and while Trump may have done more harm than good for the Republicans in the 2022 midterms, the rise of various Trump-backed supporters has led to a much more radical and pro-Trump composition of the House. The Roman general also ruthlessly punished the leaders of the conservative faction (Scipio and Cato both committed suicide rather than face his wrath) and under the radical conservative House, the Republicans have upheld their promise to return the favour of impeachment to the Democrats with Speaker Kevin McCarthy ordering an impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden.
The flow-on effects of January 6 will not lead to the end of the American Republic and the rise of an imperator, but it has and will continue to fundamentally reshape the landscape of American politics. Not since 1814, when the British forces took Washington, has a group successfully ‘invaded’ the Capitol building. This event makes political violence acceptable; a state where political violence is acceptable cannot reasonably be called a democracy. The United States continues to trend towards a liberal non-democracy, and while the Roman Republic was by no means truly democratic to begin with, we might argue that Caesar’s victory also created a liberal non-democracy (Caesar was of course quite progressive for his day). Caesar championed land redistribution and debt cancellation for the poor and reformed the census to create a more equitable tax system. On the other hand, he created masses of new senators to stack votes in support of his legislative agenda and had himself appointed dictator for life. In our day, we see the United States slip towards non-democracy such as Republicans seeking to reduce voter-turnout in order to gain and retain power.
The similarities between Caesar and Trump and the crossing of the Rubicon and the Potomac may not appear obvious at first. This might be due to the fact that we see the former event as a successful step in maintaining power and the latter event as a desperate last attempt resulting in numerous criminal indictments. However, when we look beyond the events themselves and instead towards their outcomes and what they represent about the systems in which they occurred, the similarities become clear. January 6 was a momentous occasion in American history and its echoes, like Caesar’s choice to enter Italy, will reverberate through the country’s political history.