When a person was dying, nearly 60 years ago, they stayed at home, as was the case with my grandfather who spent several months bedridden in our lounge room, becoming weaker as the days past.
Being in my early my early teenage years and living in a home drenched in death, I almost become the de facto son of that aforementioned uncle and his wife.
Looking back that time with my cousins and, strangely my uncle, has impacted my life and shapes my thinking even more today.
My uncle was good man, he sold farm machinery, something I’m told he was good at as he loved yarning with farmers, ultimately his customers.
His home, tiny by comparison to today’s mansion-like houses, was well kept, sat on two blocks of land, surrounded by a manicured garden and several fruit trees, ensuring the family had much to preserve.
He was a quiet and peaceful man who didn’t like anything unsettling, so much so he would fish without hook as he didn’t want his restful and contemplative time on the riverbank interrupted by the rudeness of a fish taking the bait.
I knew much about him, but considered forensically, he was realistically a complete stranger.
My uncle was what I now understand to be a “quietist” — he naturally had views and opinions about most things, grumbled occasionally, but never, as far as I knew, attempted to impose upon others and quietly got on with the minutiae of life.
The girls obviously had many books, but my uncle didn’t appear to be a reader, and then one day, I spotted a book on a shelf in his lounge room that immediately helped me better understand who and what he was — that wasn’t immediate, but now it’s clear.
He was a closet socialist, living and surviving in a capitalist world; a world that was tame compared to the neo-liberalism and somewhat authoritarian ways much of the world now seems to be eagerly embracing.
That book washed over me at the time, but oddly, some 65 years later, it’s again found a niche in my landscape — socialism, enacted with the appropriate intent appears to be a workable solution to ills that have wounded the world community.
Do not despair, socialism stands upon its own foundations as a method of governance and is not, as many fear, communism, something with which many conflate it.
For the sake of the argument, let’s turn to the Encyclopaedia Brittanica for a meaning:
“Socialism — social and economic doctrine that calls for public rather than private ownership or control of property and natural resources. According to the socialist view, individuals do not live or work in isolation but live in cooperation with one another. “Furthermore, everything that people produce is in some sense a social product, and everyone who contributes to the production of a good is entitled to a share in it. Society as a whole, therefore, should own or at least control property for the benefit of all its members.”
And all those years ago my uncle had already figured out that public endeavour, in every respect, trumps private concerns.
There were times I can recall as editor of this newspaper when the entire staff, from the front to the back of the building, put personal and private concerns aside, to achieve a public good — it was both uplifting and emotionally rewarding, and made the group even stronger and more effective.
Even though no-one said it, or probably even thought it, but that was socialism at work, or in modern managerial parlance, teamwork.
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