We are embarrassing ourselves – rabbits in the headlights of dehumanising global forces and seemingly powerless to formulate a response to an existential threat while waiting to see if it’s ‘bad enough yet?’ and we can start rebuilding.
American’s illiberal global financial hegemony has been strip-mining the planet for 70 years, yet the country re-elected president Donald Trump twice. Will the more admirable half of its citizenry reach collective breaking point?
As I write this, California’s outraged governor Gavin Newsom is set to sue the bellicose Trump administration for federalising the National Guard in Los Angeles to quell riots aimed at the president’s wholesale immigration raids and his iniquitous quota of 3000 detentions a day.
Witnessing violent abductions on your own street in broad daylight must be hard to take, a reminder of Stalin and Solzhenitsyn’s Russia and their homegrown ‘McCarthyism’ of the 1950s. The slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza to make way for a new Middle Eastern Riviera for Trump is equally appalling in the face of all that terrible rubble and children’s bodies. Ukraine fights back but is hung out to dry and ripe for economic plunder. The unimaginable cost of global job losses and instability in government performance.
All have a cost and beggar belief.
Whether last weekend’s flicker of Californian empathy can beat Trump’s jingoism remains to be seen. We would all like to see that he has been underestimating Americans’ real capacity to feel compassion for immigrants, but also for its own desperately disadvantaged.
It would also be reassuring to think that educated and well-heeled Americans might have been underestimating themselves. Until now.
This Sunday’s (14 June) planned protests across the entire US will be a litmus test.
From 2010 to 2020, more people participated in protests than at any other point in human history. Yet we are not living in more just and democratic societies as a result.
Journalist Vincent Bevins, author of If We Burn: the Mass Protest Decade, carried out worldwide interviews questioning how so many mass protests lead to the exact opposite of what they asked for.
The weakened state of civil society and a widespread climate of fear at the economic and political fusion of billionaire resources with the powers of the state came to light.
And the fact that the people most affected live incredibly precarious lives, work far too much and pay far too much in rent to be able to survive.
That’s us in New Zealand too.
We live in a land of milk and honey and can feed 10 times our actual population. Yet, for several years here, every economic and budget headline has blandly noted that the people most affected in our artificially straited society are those least able to pay.
Not once has there been any mitigation and we seem unable to find a chink in this ideological certainty for demanding robust discussions. Not a step towards regulating supermarkets’ grievous profits, or offshore banks’ rigorous self-interest, or housing availability.
Instead, Thatcherite austerity 2.01 lands disproportionally on the very people who cannot afford 69 percent increases in fruit and vegetables and gave up trying when butter went over $10 for 500 grams. Families who work two full time jobs, and sometimes three, still cannot afford to pick up the shortfall of services for their children’s teeth or mental health or schooling, or afterschool programs, or shoes, or home study resources.
The $3 replacement for former initiatives that delivered hot and nutritious school lunches that had been generating incalculable benefits right across every narrative for children’s wellbeing, including disaffected youth and improved classroom engagement, was unconscionable.
A recent brains trust initiative by 13 South Island boys’ schools to raise achievement and strengthen engagement with their students, particularly poorer ones, was headlined last weekend in the Sunday Star Times. Rugby is a hook, but issues that boys struggle with have little to do with the progress of women, and a lot more to do with the ways that traditional norms of masculinity have put young men in a box, they say.
For 30 years, young men have been falling behind in the move from education to employment or training and Steve Hart, principal at St Thomas of Canterbury College in Christchurch says his school’s academic success rate rocketed as a result of building strong relationships with their students.
“Boys are very, very relational. When you get that right, you get the results. Particularly with the Māori and Pasifica students,” he said. “Our University Entrance results have moved up from a 50 percent pass rate up to 75 percent. Which is right up there across the country.”
Specious political handwringing about ‘screens’ and boot camps merely deflect from the fact that children themselves don’t appear at all in our own political narrative, let alone remedial action. Yet they must.
• Liz Waters
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