The work life balance eternal pursuit is more and more relevant as we have more educated experienced women who choose family life over career ambition in spite of supportive partners ..

As mass surveillance by companies and government increases, digital privacy becomes more and more important. Information professionals have many skills that can contribute to educating and informing citizens about the importance of intellectual freedom.

It seems to create the notion that we can never be satisfied with what we have.. Perhaps it’s needed to keep us motivated to keep doing the job.. However, it can ale lead to constant stress in the work place and dampen creativity.

Are we doing so much damage to ourselves and others that a forced expiry date may be a good thing? Are we mature enough to put a doctored nuclear holocaust or global species-wide euthanasia to a vote, or simply discuss?

We are constantly outsourcing social tasks, child care, aged care, any care actually. Our level of tolerance and sense of community is constantly diminishing, causing more depression and social problems. Why aren’t we encouraging mothers to spend time with their kids instead of putting them in care? Why aren’t we supporting adult children in looking after their aging parents. Why don’t we help each other more? Is it all about money? Appearances? Lack of tolerance?

This has been a conspicuous problem with the Howard and Abbott governments, but always a potential one. In the case of climate change it is particularly pressing to take positive action ( see Naomi Klein -This changes everything). Refugee policy would be another issue.

In Australia we’ve got the dominant view that hung parliaments and large cross benches are ‘unworkable’ and ‘feral’. Why? In Europe hung parliaments are normal, and there are often many parties represented in the parliament.

Would we benefit from more diverse parties and viewpoints in parliament?

These things seem at odds, and unsustainable. There has to be a better way forward.

It seems that in an increasingly material world lust is getting the upped hand, but the idealist in me hopes that love prevails.

I can’t bear meditation – am I the only one? It’s such a buzz-concept at the moment; others must be wondering too.

And don’t say “humankind”, that’s no fun.

This is a long and winding tale. Gather round, ye children, come warm yourselves by this (digital) fire. It is said that many ages ago, we humanobots had a different form, that indeed, we too had flesh like the angels of myth & legend. I know, I know—calm yourselves, it is sacrilege to say this, yes, but I believe it to be true. We staggered about on stalks of meat and bone, unwieldy and confused, but possessed of a kind of grace, too. Songs were written about it, some scraps of which remain to us now, such as that of acclaimed poet, the Black Eye, who wrote of his humps, his humps, his lovely little lumps. Long have we pondered these lines. The world, too, was changed—a vast and green place, full of growing things, other creatures of flesh, many of which were vile and poisonous or simply annoying, perhaps explaining why they were destroyed. Why our lumpy ancestors did not rouse themselves in time to stop the wrathful oceans and angry skies. Alas, they had fallen too deeply in love with our other parents, the screens and tubes and bots, this other landscape which is now our permanent home. I cannot help but wonder, dear pixelated children, avatars of thought, what our world might look like today if not for their love of the intangible, and the apocalypse of neglect that transformed it into a twisted pathway to survival?

Can you tell us how we, the people, convince the United nations to act as a genuine force for good in the world by bringing together the might of the world’s most powerful nations to rectify, at its source, the trauma these individuals are enduring? Or can you suggest other ways we can act? I’m asking this question out of sheer frustration that we can do nothing more than be compassionate to the world’s victims AFTER the event. People power has achieved results before, so perhaps those caring people can do more now – but how?