What the F*ck? Melbournians are Fined for Public Swearing?

Oh? So a new law just came in today stating that if one swore in a public place, they would be fined $500? And people are now swearing at that law because it oppresses their sense of public freedom? 

Let me bring in a little anecdote of something that happens all too regularly on an ordinary trip to a local shopping centre - I witness teenagers in their little groups of 'cool,' using derogatory terms about homosexuals, filthy words to replace the act fornication, and even more horrid words against people of varied races and skin colours. I hear older boys swearing around younger children, deteriorating one of their aspects of innocence by the simple act of cussing. I hear the not-so-classy people wearing torn pants and a stained singlet walking around swearing at kiosks for not letting them purchase a drink which costs five cents more than they can afford.

I still remember the first time I heard the word 'f*ck'. I was in the courtyard at my primary school, in a brick-cylinder, playing with a tennis ball, slamming it against the wall and talking to my friends about our latest Pok'emon catches. All of the sudden, the 'cool' boy in year six and his gang of followers walked in. They all gathered around him as my friends and I took a step back, and we, not knowing about the greatest spectacle that was to come from this boy's mouth, eavesdropped at the very moment he said it, and we all gasped. He gave a 'cool' smile and then walked out of the brick cylinder. We just stood there, unable to accept what had just happened. Did we just hear that? Did he really just say that? Yes, yes he did. I know that from that moment, at the age of just nine, an aspect of my innocence was taken from me.

I know that things are far different now than they were in the year 2001. I know that a lot of children nine and under have access to the internet and are exposed to things that they were never meant to know until they had neared the middle of puberty, and I know that some of these kids even use those words themselves because they hear it all too often in their households. Nevertheless, if the government imposes such a fine upon filthy public vocabulary, then the hearing of these terms would be sprawled around our public sphere less, and it will slowly but surely turn into a social norm that words such as 'f*ck' and 'c*nt' are not acceptable to use in sentences to describe things in negative or positive ways, nor are they acceptable to replace words like those that describe the act of fornication, those that come before a feeling to emphasise the feeling of that feeling, nor to replace 'heck' in exclamations like 'what the heck!'

I believe that swear words have their places, such as if one was speaking to their peers in a private room in the library about an assignment that they loathe, or if someone is in a lot of traffic on their way to a meeting that had started without them thirty minutes ago, but I do not believe that it should be used around the general public where innocent ears lurk, nor towards authoritative figures like police officers when the user of those words has clearly committed an offence: police are people too, they are just far more caring about the safety of others to ignore that man who is running off with a new television from Harvey Norman, or to ignore that drunk indecent man flashing his private parts to a group of year 7 girls exiting from their highschool and taking the shortcut home through an alleyway around the corner, or that crazy woman who pressed her lit cigarette onto a young man's forearm and as he came to hit her began yelling about how he is sexually assaulting her. There are far too many problems occurring in the world for us to just stop and complain about the stripping of our freedom because of the taking away of our indecency to use words of vulgarity around others in public.

I mean, think about it, really - do you really need words of profanity in your everyday discourse? Recently, I have excluded most of my vulgar language use in my conversations due to the fact that I now work with adolescents and children, and I have found myself using varied adjectives rather than that monotonous 'f*ck' word. I have found that my sense of description is far more expansive, and that instead of saying "what the f*ck?!", "why did that just happen, I don't quite feel comfortable about how that person responded to that and I particularly don't enjoy how that saucepan had almost his me right in the head had I not ducked in time!" works far more better. It states what happened, and it states my opinion about what happened, so that a three-dimensional form of reasoning emanates from my mouth, rather than an unpretentious, overrated word.

Challenge yourself, before a $500 fine does. The world is much more three-dimensional with artistic conversation. Try to use descriptive words rather than the bland words Samuel L. Jackson uses in his film Snakes on a Plane. I mean, he says the word "motherf*cker" so much that the viewer forgets the movie is about snakes on a plane rather than a mother who keeps on fornicating. Language is beautiful, do not kill it with profanity. 

Horses Wearing Blinkers Whilst Driving

It appears as though every time I decide to visit a shopping centre, something somewhat potentially chaotic occurs.

I would like to re-emphasise that I was at a shopping centre when this incident occurred, not a farm, orchard, nor paddock. I approached the pedestrian crossing, a couple of minutes after jokingly saying to my sister that pedestrian crossings are burial grounds, when all of the sudden a horse raced past, just as I had set my foot on the lined path. I immediately withdrew any part of my body which momentarily strayed from the footpath in a panic, and yelled out, “are you a horse?”

Indeed so - I had just asked a lady, really loudly, if she was a horse - because like a horse wearing blinkers, she raced through the pedestrian crossing that I was about to cross, without bothering to look and stop. She neighed in reply and galloped off into the industrial-smelling carpark. If only I merely received a neigh in response. Instead, as though she actually were wearing blinkers, she did not even bother turning her head, nor her eyes. She trotted on through the other three pedestrian crossings in the same way.

The amount of times I have said 'goodness me' instead of a very bad swear word today should have me rewarded three times my height in a pirate's gold. How I managed to control my temper and not chase her car nor leave a massive inverted dent in her boot’s door, I will never know. Every time I vow never to display anger problems in public, I am given reasons to back out of that vow and figuratively rip my mouth in half with vile words like Hulk Hogan on a swearing rampage. And today, it was a horse-person who brought out the Hulk inside of me.

For a split second, in fact, I believe I almost turned green. My skin colour began to react to my anger in response to almost getting wiped out by a crazy menopausal woman wearing horseshoes. Had the government placed any more warning signs reading ‘pedestrian crossing’ and ‘slow down’, nobody would accelerate within the proximity of the shopping centre. In fact, they would park their cars at home and walk, not paying attention to the possible long distance they would have to endeavor.

I hope that next time I choose to walk on a pedestrian crossing, that the people driving cars towards the crossing are not horses. I sincerely hope that they pay attention to the fact that a person of my size, wearing such bright colours is crossing on a path where it is legal for a person like me to press charges against a horse like the woman for not allowing me a safe passage and potentially running me over.

Please, if you choose to drive, remember that you are not carrying a jockey nor pulling a wagon in the wild west. You are a cognitive human. Act so.