Mandy Nolan’s Soapbox: Are we losing the Raffle?

The last day off I had was June 23. The next one is sometime in September. I was wondering the other day why I was feeling a bit tired so I checked my diary. Oops. Apparently they invented this thing called the ‘weekend’. Ostensibly it was to refresh the worforce. Or at least give them time to yell at their kids, mow the lawn and wash their undies. And maybe go shopping. There’s no point to a capitalist system if you don’t have time to spend your money or get into debt. Or cut down old growth forests. Or up your carbon footprint.

I work weekends. So they tend to be booked. I also work during the week. Meetings, gigs, fundraisers, podcasts, rallies, talks, training, writing. My weirdly impossible career is a patchwork of opportunities that have either come my way or I have hustled. In fact, hustling takes up a lot of my time. Hustling is basically me saying: this is happening I think you might like it. I am like an iceberg, for the bit of me you see out in the public, there is a whole lot more submerged hustle. Some days I think I might have pulled my hustle muscle. 

I also spend a lot of time trying to change stuff. Yelling at ‘the man’. In the last week I’ve MC’d a forest rally, attended a full day at the Green Institute Conference learning about more shit ‘the man’ is fucking up, hosted a rally on the Gold Coast in response to the worker who was arrested for alleged child sexual abuse while calling for childcare reforms to better protect children, and yesterday I did a show raising money for the Grace Tame Foundation. In the coming weeks I’m doing some fundraising for koalas, raising money for adolescent mental health, and a sleep out for homelessness. There are so many worthy causes. And so many good people doing incredible work. They are the relentless driving force of compassion. They are the heart of our communities, so I wonder, are they tired too? Is their hustle muscle broken?

Caring about the awful shit that happens in the world is exhausting. Things don’t change unless you get involved. Things don’t change unless you change them. People ask me all the time ‘How do you do so much?’ I am often tempted to answer ‘How do you do so little?’ Because frankly, if more people did something, then the rest of us could have a cup of tea and a lie down. 

Have you seen what we need to do? Can you help? Can you roll up your sleeves? Can you be part of the change? Can you come yell with us? There are organisations all around this country that need volunteers. Every week I am lucky to meet the unseen people who are extraordinary. People who inspire me with their selfless devotion to community. To making a difference. It makes giving up my weekends that bit easier. What I give seems inconsequential, and to be honest, it never feels enough. 

I often wonder what it’s like to not care. To be happy with a world where people cut down koala trees, and leave injured wildlife on the side of the road, or refugees in offshore detention and Julian Assange languishing in some almost forgotten political fog. To know women are murdered in their homes every week. To have no sense of injustice about living in a stolen country. To not feel gutted every time a politician green-lights another coal mine. To see the super-wealthy get massive tax cuts, giant homes sit empty, old women put their possessions in a shopping trolley while our local homelessness service begs for money to keep its doors open. 

Every time I sell raffle tickets to raise money for homelessness, where I award a prize to a person to put in a home they don’t have, I wonder what we are doing. I wonder if our raffles make a difference. Can we bridge the wealth gap with a $5 raffle ticket? I stand in the abyss of social injustice saying ‘number 42!’

I wonder how they can sleep. Those people who have everything. Those people who have access to power to make the change that don’t. I bet those fuckers have weekends.

They better buy raffle tickets.