What’s the best drama series anywhere? The Donald! He’s holed up in the White House; teams of prosecutors arrest and charge his associates and Fake News reveals more about the chaos presidency each day. There's hush money pay-offs, a safe stuffed with secret documents, a White House staffer’s anonymous Op-ed in the NY Times. He wrote he was part of ‘The Resistance,’ which reins in the President. ‘TREASON!’ tweeted Trump. Unfortunate. Trump's campaign is under investigation for collusion with Russia…But it’s Spring, with flowers like this so who needs drama?
Over the years I’ve been privileged, on occasions, to live with local families while visiting Fiji and Samoa. This has led to memorable, enriching experiences, far removed from those of the tourists staying at the resorts.
Of course, staying with someone usually comes with expectations, for example, Sunday church attendance. It’s compulsory – no ifs, no buts.
Somebody said my computer was old, they did, they did.
Then another blessed with a pronounced sense of humour, asked what Windows I used. And as if this was overheard somewhere out there in some cyber conspiracy, website after website wanted to know my computer’s credentials – then turned it away…
Climate change is in the news as I write this piece, with tragic fatalities caused by the wildfires in California.
I don’t know what other boomers expected from this election but here’s what one, not a million miles from this keyboard hopes for:
Hope. In the arid landscape of ideology over the past 30 odd years it was as precious as water – but there’s an oasis ahead and room for hope. Just look at what’s happened abroad, as Martin Jacques wrote in the Guardian recently:
Our understanding of suicide is at best fragmentary. It’s complicated by our attitudes, religious beliefs, whether the deceased was a close friend or family member. The most acceptable position to settle on when someone close has committed suicide is to say, ‘the balance of his mind was disturbed’. It offers more satisfaction than living with a lifelong unresolved quest for answers. Mental disturbance has the advantage of absolving both the subject and survivors of moral examination and uncertainty. Nevertheless, a degree of uncertainty is inevitable.
It’s not easy being green… and especially not in Auckland. The most common suburban sounds here for the past five years has been the angry buzz of chainsaws. To hear them is bad enough because you know that another beautiful tree is about to fall because, well it’s in the way of sunlight/developers/over-sized houses. One third of the city’s residential trees have been felled in the past five years according to the Tree Council.
The results are in. The swearing-inners have sworn. The dust has settled – but the whining,the utter incomprehension of the bewildered born-to-rule shows no sign of abating. Judging by the first week after confirmation that a coalition of Labour, NZ First and the Greens would be the Government, the first of the moans is the least accurate, but makes a good slogan for the newly dispossessed and it goes – and will go – like this:
(Part One)
Such are the ripples of lifelong hurt, it is unwise to start a conversation about suicide with people you don’t know very well. Nevertheless, the subject is bursting to be talked about.
It’s over… sort of. Yet something seems missing, something so boring it wouldn’t make it to the debates about the pressing issues of homeless, inequality and the other depressing social indicators.
It’s not so much a policy as a theory which has guided this and other Government’s policy since the Reagan-Thatcher years. A time so brainless it ran on the empty slogan of ‘there is no alternative’.