COLUMN: 'This isn't a rant...it's a prophecy of where we are headed,' writes Karl Clancy

By now you’ll know that I see the Art of Acceptance as seeing the world how it is and responding appropriately and this article is no exception. This isn't a rant, it's an admonition, a prophecy of where we are headed if we don't choose to be better.

Every civilisation, towards its end, sees wilder swings in behaviour, both good and evil, and ours is no exception. We are at a pivot point in how we are going to move forward.

It isn't enough to educate our sons or even our daughters, we must first educate ourselves to what's wrong with how we live. Education programs are laudable but useless in the face of a much wider issue. How do we really value women?

We must educate everyone on this rock that women are valuable beyond measure simply because they are here, not for our relationship to them or for what they do for us men or what our direct relationship is with them in a familial sense.

Every woman is a sister.

We are increasingly divorced from each other, from the land, from nature, from the idea that compassion for all people, all animals and the world itself is essential to our survival.

We have isolated ourselves from the bonds of community in favour of a digital landscape and let me tell you now, bits, bytes and social media will not warm us like actual human contact. 

This has never been so apparent in how we disregard each other.

The concept of unity, of understanding that every soul is both brother and sister is under attack and we are being divided into smaller and smaller factions until the last gasp, when we will stand alone, stand for anything and all because we stood up for nothing.

We did not raise a united voice for each other. Instead we thought that as long as we are okay to hell with everyone else. 

That a woman out running alone has lost her life is sickening.

As someone with first hand experience of being attacked unprovoked and suffering serious injury necessitating surgery after a stabbing and being clubbed with a pick axe handle, as someone who knows first hand how having bodily autonomy stolen from you is a stain that never washes away, I can say that there will always be those on the fringe of sanity that see others as prey because they aren't being vigilant. 

The problem we face is that our society is so broken that it's breeding the humanity out of the humans and these lurkers on the fringe are becoming more common and it's infecting both our adults and our young, an insidious lack of compassion for anyone or anything, the take what I will because I can mentality, and it will continue to descend into greater madness for as long as this society promotes take and gain as a culture.

Take a watch, take a wallet, take a car, take a body's right to say no, take a life.. this is the precipice of the cliff on which we stand and the ground is giving way underfoot. 

We shouldn't have to but we must remember that we become prey when we stray from the herd. There is only safety in numbers. We are in the wild again and I deplore that it is so especially for every woman out there. 

Until we face the spectres to which we have given birth, humanity will walk through the valley of the shadow of death, fearing the ghosts we brought with us and the ones left there by generations long since dead.

They, long since passed, are at peace but we are slowly sinking into the foetid swamp of our own madness, where we will find only the blackest souls ready to see us as easy prey.

The worst paradox of all is that we are the most guilty, through inaction and capitulation, through fear of raising our voices in dissent and through the manufactured compliance of our cancel culture. 

I've had my opinion of feminism challenged, chastened and changed by two women, my daughters.

They have taught me that women aren't looking for equality of opportunity or outcome, but rather equality of respect for their unique position in the world. We have created a world where equality to many men equates to equality of physicality, not of dignity, where the ability to physically overpower is equality because women can't have it both ways.

They have to be able to fight like a man. To be equal is to suffer the violence men inflict on men with equal ferocity and lack of regard for the outcome or the victim. 

Perhaps the one ethnic group most in need of exalted and protected status in our society is women. They are not only the progenitors but the teachers and the way back to a place where might doesn't equate with right.

If sentences were made appropriate, if men and boys were educated by all the men and women around them and if media's message was written for them by the women of the world, maybe then, just maybe a woman could go for a run, confident that any man she meets will see her as someone to aspire to, someone to use his physicality to protect from the lunatics on the fringe and in doing, push the fringe back to the most rare recesses of humanity rather than seeing it slither into the centre of who we are.