Brilliant.
As a parent of a now 17 year old young man this issue has worried me since around the time we decided to have a child. I’ve always worried that my generation would be remembered as the one who screwed it all up because we did.
Not my tribe, of course, all we wanted was harmony, some rocking good music, to end all wars, and for the drugs not to run out and, while it seemed to be going well for awhile, we hadn’t noticed the draft-dodging Ivy Leaguers accumulating all the resources and eventually all the power.
Add in the madness of fundamentalist Christianity with it’s death lust and from Kennedy on we were pretty much fucked. Britain has the eccentricity of its loopy royals and it class system while the US, a proud Republic, has the dynasties of Kennedy, Bush and Clinton and now the nepotism of ‘anointed by God’ Trump who’s really just George III in a bad wig and a baggy suit.
So, while the world is still peopled by ageing hippies like me – and Tainui – who ache for a world without war, who still yearn for great music but who now need a more effective reflux medication than marijuana, we’ve passed the baton on to the enemy without even a whimper and we’ve allowed them to claim it in the name of a Jesus who doesn’t exist in any book I’ve ever read.
So, in a way, I celebrate the arrival of COVID19. It’s come at the right time and without any invitation from me but it’ll do all the things I want and have failed to achieve in decades of well-intentioned, if retrospectively impotent, activism. It’ll give the planet a breather, it’ll crash stock markets and enable us to explore more equitable, needs-based, methods of sharing, it’ll cripple the 1% who’ve collected all the toys and it will reverse the mantra from ‘the guy who dies with the most toys wins’ to ‘the guy who dies with the most toys still fucking dies’.
Perhaps most importantly, though, it gives me, and people like me, back our independence and some control over our collective destinies. Some old radical once said that without life there is no hope.
COVID19 is scary and it does threaten to take my life, but it also gives me an opportunity to claw back some of the hope that’s been drifting off into a mist of ageing melancholy if only I can do what the universe is none too subtly nudging me to do. If I can, and it’s actually painfully simple, I will be able to keep what’s left of my otherwise miserable life in the most deliciously ironic way imaginable: all I have to do is stay in my whare, put a bear in my window, and regularly wash my paws. It really is that simple.
If my son and his mates, my spouse and hers, and you and your whānau, all do the same, everything will be just sweet. We can each renew our contract with the universe, a contact that simply says that if we look after Papatūānuku, she’ll look after us. Nice to know that, if there is a Goddess, she’s a Socialist with a brutal sense of the absurd, eh? Ka pai!
e-Tangata article
dykiegirl 