think about donating your Christmas cheese wheel

Around this time of year I find it difficult to handle the complacency and abundance of wealth found in Australian society.

Here are some things to be thankful for:

- Militia aren't running our country.

- If you live in the city (which 89% of us do) you can be sure that there will be a selection of cheeses available at your closest supermarket.

- You can probably make a little cushion from your chin fat to take a nap on (67% of us are obese), and if you can't, you can develop one thanks of afore mentioned cheese abundance.

- You can get a job with some hard work. The highest our unemployment rate has ever been was 10.90% in 1992. Right now it's harder to get work in the US and the UK. The latest stats for Zimbabwe say 70% of its citizens don't have work. 

- Ok so rent prices might be a bit exorbitant in certain urban locations... but hey, we have infrastructure that hasn't been dilapidated by war. 

- Our racism is subliminal, not violent - except for when it bubbles up into sporadic spontaneous riots - meaning that people here can live by their diverse ideological and religious convictions without being publicly flogged or incarcerated or told what to wear, say, how to pray or how to eat. I can stand at Town Hall and hear the Hare Krsna's chanting on George St whilst Muslims hand out flyers and Falun Gong activists ask me to sign their petitions.

- If you need to go to the toilet, you can go to a toilet! You can extricate your excrement by pressing a little button. What's more, these miraculous sanitary water-powered shit-redistribution systems are available cost-free in public high pedestrian traffic locations.

- If you're thirsty in the shower you can take a sip and not die from cholera.

- We have a public welfare system that doesn't thrive on bribery.

How do you explain the privileges of a society to the children who have not seen their privilege? How did I ever learn to see my privilege?
I watched world news when I was growing up. Sometimes I would wish we had a junta or a revolution or some obvious human rights abuses so that there was some kind of motivation for young people to care about politics... Hardship motivates people to strive for better lives. Instead we have comfortable lives. Complacent lives.

Of course I wouldn't exchange the lucky fortune of living in this land for being thrown into war or famine or a typhoon, but I would change our education system so that it holds compassion as its core value.

Statistically accurate "Cheese Wheel of Bad Luck"

wherein "you" are represented by a tiny little wedge that has been extracted and "lots of other people" are stuck in the bad cheese.