Over the weekend, I spoke to a lady through my volunteering who told me she’d recently found a centipede in her house. She lives in the country, where there are far more of these nasty little critters, so she’s always on the lookout for them. She said she managed to chase it outside and it scurried away, but then she told me she’s actually been bitten by one before. She said it was the most painful thing she has ever experienced.
She called the Poisons Hotline, and they told her that if she didn’t have an allergic reaction within the first ten minutes, she would be fine and luckily she didn’t have any issues.
Her story reminded me of when, at Mum and Dad’s old house, I once came across a centipede downstairs in my little area. I guided it outside and, from memory, I sprayed it with Raid, which I probably shouldn’t have done but you can see a photo of it below.
I sometimes think like a vegan, and I try not to kill little creepy crawlies like this, but they move so quickly and unpredictably that sometimes it feels like killing them is the only option.
Every time I go to a pro-Palestine rally or attend a function for Gaza, my brother sends me a news report about Sudan. According to Amnesty International, since 2023 the ongoing conflict there has killed more than 150,000 people. Entire communities have been wiped out. More than 12 million people have been forced to flee their homes.
The point Eric keeps making is that what’s happening in Sudan is far worse in scale, yet you almost never hear about it on the news. You don’t see marches, rallies, or widespread public outrage. When he first began sending me these messages, I assumed he was deflecting away from Gaza. That’s because he has always been incredibly unsympathetic to the Palestinian cause, and I thought he was simply using Sudan to avoid acknowledging what Israel is doing.
But the thing is, he’s right. The situation in Sudan is worse in terms of sheer devastation. And even though I still feel passionately about stopping Israel’s genocide in Gaza, his messages forced me to confront a deeper question: why don’t people care about Sudan?
My conclusion was uncomfortable but simple: it’s the same reason the world barely cared when nearly a million Tutsis were murdered by Hutu extremists in Rwanda in 1994. The victims were Black. They were African. And globally, Black suffering has never commanded the same level of attention, empathy, or urgency that white or Middle Eastern suffering does.
Australia is racist. But so is the entire world.
And there’s an irony buried inside all of this. The first humans were Black. They came out of Africa. They are the beginning of all our bloodlines. Humanity owes its entire existence to Black people, and still — in crisis after crisis — they are treated as though their lives matter less.
I think it would be fascinating, in some cosmic reversal, to see what would happen if Black people held unquestioned power in the next life — if they were the racially dominant group, the ones whose lives were automatically valued, protected, and centred. Would they treat us the way the world has treated them? Or would they show a level of humanity, restraint, and justice that we never managed to offer them?
