Thought for the day, 5 February 2025

A reflection.

Humans are both stupid and sublime. I thought about this a lot when I wrote my PhD. I studied social policy in Aotearoa, and the contrasts in our history captured me. We were a nation that, at our height, built ten thousand state houses a year to give people dignity - while we beat the reo out of kids at school.

These are only two of countless examples. Extraordinary and useless at once: that's people for you.

So much of that era of social policy came out of war. I mean, we got off lightly compared to Europe - but that doesn't mean we didn't suffer. So much fed the war, and so much spilled out of it.

Afterwards, we said 'Never again'. We set up international institutions to try to maintain stability and peace and reason. That stability and peace and reason were far more comfortable for some than others, and themselves came under fire - from indigenous peoples, women, rainbow folks, disabled people, plenty more. But none of these groups wanted to smash things; or if they did, it was only because they wanted to replace them with something better.

The 'Never again' came from horror. Generations who experience horror want to protect their kids from the memory, but still make sure their kids remember enough for their own protection. It's an impossible balancing act - and ultimately, it's the kids and their kids who must decide how they will grapple with history for themselves.

I wonder, sometimes, if we only ever learn from horror after the fact - that we are sleepwalking into what is to come. That our mokos will write books decades from now to celebrate the heroes - and we, the everyday people who were meant to protect them, won't make the pages.

Then, I figure, it doesn't have to work that way. We are not sleepwalking, but wide awake.

And if we're awake, there's still hope to avert this.

To do our job as a generation: write the pages of the story we want to tell our mokos, not slip helplessly and shabbily into its margins.