New Zealand is a hopelessly confused country where people talk past each other, use the same words to mean different things, and can't distinguish between sentimentality and sanity. It would be laughable if it wasn't so sad and dangerous.
TV and social media imagery is overloaded with couples of mixed ethnicity. We cling to that old desire to see-ourselves-on-the-screen, a hangover from the days when our TV content was all imported. Who remembers New Zealand's early efforts like Pukemanu, described as portraying "the lives of rural, bi-cultural townsfolk, earning praise for its authentic depiction of boozy, blokey characters in swannie attire"?
The bi-cultural images aren't a problem. They reflect statistics ie fact, that more Maori partner with non-Maori than with Maori. There is something quite appealing and endearing about them. New Zealand is a country where the first settlers welcomed and joined together, literally, with the later settlers.
But change screens and consider the next image:
Decide together, Thrive together.
Decide together to be Separate? It's like deciding together to a divorce.
Separate rolls for Maori. Separate wards and separate electorates. By any stretch of the imagination, that is not togetherness.
The inevitability of mixed couples is mixed children ... and more mixed children. Generation after generation, of which there are already very many. Will they have to pick one identity over the other in perpetuity? For as long as there are different civic frameworks for Maori and non-Maori, that is what these children and unborn children are being condemned to.
It has to stop.
Today many New Zealanders embrace different cultural heritages featuring their own languages, faith, and social networks. But only Maori can choose to have advantageous separate representation based on race. Only Maori have their very own courts, jail wings, health providers, educational quotas, schools, and more, provided by the state. None of these 'privileges' are improving matters incidentally.
Yet there are people who continue to insist that separatism is somehow "thriving together."
To thrive together requires individuals to put their humanity before their ethnicity. That is what thousands have done by partnering and raising families together. There cannot be a stronger expression of togetherness.
But if ethnicity trumps humanity, all we face is a future filled with conflict. New Zealand will continue to be a country of hopeless confusion rather than clarity of common purpose.
Ahh, the symbol of the Absurdist political faith. Commonly seen in leafy suburbs of Westmere, Grey Lynn and Pt Chev, in windows, picket fences and on the back of their cars or cargo bikes, where the biggest stress of the day is not the colour option cost on the new Tesla, the Portugal trip mid winter, or should it be Budapest, but rather the constant guilt of the pointlessness of their comfortable middle-class lives and how somehow, equally pointless bumper sticker symbolism is suffice to "do their bit" as terrible white "coloniists" to right the wrongs of a Maori political culture they have little to no understanding of.
ReplyDeleteSepratism/segregation has never worked and by my reckoning of the efforts in this country thus far, it's already corroding this place from the inside. If our bumper sticker bearers haven't noticed, using pidgin Maori in your emails, learning some 'reo, and pretending to accept unconscious bias and racism has not improved anything, in fact it's got worse. And any ground given for this noble cause only ratchets up the never ending demands and invention of victimhood. Nor has assuming Maori myths and legends trump western science. Or throwing literally billions of dollars to "Maori for Maori" has benefited anyone but the cash handlers.
The concerning thing is that although the good white folk who subscribe to this nonsense have learnt nothing, neither have a decent chunk of our political class, National being a prime offender, Labour, Green etc simply write offs in that direction. But it's local body as well. In Auckland it's sheep in wolf clothing mayor, who, alongside his big spending progressives friends in council, showed his hand by abstention on maori wards. The unelected but power controlling members who sit there based on race can and will do a lot of damage. Their motives and those of democratically elected members are poles apart and their presence has nothing to do with pipes and roads or libraries. They need not worry about being elected. You cannot get rid of them.
A confused country we are. Few of us wanted Maori to do anything but positively thrive, it's just some of us have long since woken up the reality that no matter what we do, some Maori are doomed to failure and their politcal handlers are part of that problem. And that those same political handlers want power and control, not well being.
Not sure they are “couples of ethnicity”. It seems to me they’re always white women with non-white men
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