For those of us who wish to uphold compassionate politics the struggle against populist and neo-liberal ideologies seems to get harder by the day.
Around one, resignation rules the roost. Constantly you hear friends and neighbours saying, "I can’t watch the news any more."
Obviously, the way things are at the moment is getting folk down: our Southern hospital in limbo, global warming chucked into the too hard basket, the Putins, Netanyahus and Trumps hogging the world stage.
We’ve just farewelled a close friend who will cope with the particular hellhole she has to return to by opting for "inner emigration", focusing on family and career, the domestic and the immediate. In tough times finding one’s little niche of normality has always been a good move.
In the grey bureaucracy of Communist East Germany, the colourful garden allotments with their lovingly furnished huts were oases of naturalness. Folk relaxed there, gathered for tea and a chat, got their fingers into Mother Earth.
Fine and good, of course, yet we know that if the good stay silent, nothing will ever change.
For that to happen it took the little activist groups, the poets and prophets, politicised church services, to critique the language and the system.
So how are we to resist resignation? In so many ways we have it easier. We don’t have to cope with secret police and a totalitarian party.
When some 35,000 of us gathered in the Octagon to voice outrage at the betrayal of the plans for our new hospital there was disgust at broken promises, and a determination to stand by our doctors and nurses, working in impossible conditions, but maybe the real energy came from a gut instinct that we are better than this, and that there are no short cuts to good health.
We were tapping into something that brought us all together, young and old, from every point of the political compass.
It was an insurrection of the spirit which reminded me of the costly commitment to the common good that was there from the beginning in Otago and Southland.
Quite incredible, when you think about it, that its raw pioneer community, most of whose members were struggling for their own survival, managed to set resources apart for schools, including girls’ schools, for a university, for steepling churches, for healthcare. All part of our cultural heritage today. When times get tough, again we can draw on these memories.
One real problem for our coalition government is its assumption that none of this history matters. Fast-tracking progress is everything, and history is bunk.
But as poets like Brian Turner spell out for us, there is a "wider world" out there, a heritage to be cherished.
No doubt we are learning, too, from the tagata whenua that our whakapapa is anything but a luxury, but the lifeblood coursing through our veins.
Whether of Scottish, English, Irish, Chinese, Lebanese, Jewish, German, Dutch or Syrian descent, it is vital that we know who we are and stand tall by the songs and stories of our people.
Last year at the celebrations of 150 years of Polish settlement, the pride of their descendants at recovering their roots was palpable. One senses this same dynamic of a living past in our brave Ukrainian and Palestinian communities.
At stake, then, in the unease many of us sense about everything from ferries across the Cook Strait to charter schools and boot camps, is a concern about our very identity as New Zealanders.
We know that we are better than this obsession about paring back budgets.
Here, in Dunedin, we are exceptionally fortunate — being able to benefit from the vivid presentation of our bicultural, incredibly varied heritage in Toitu’s exhibitions and documentaries. There is, no doubt, a seductiveness about capitulating to the drift of events, blocking out the news. "Inner emigration" has its attractions.
But if we believe that we are better than this then our proud heritage of thrawn (stubborn) defiance of complacency becomes a sturdy weapon. Let’s draw on it.
And how good that our own New Zealand history is at last to be taken more seriously in our schools?
— The Rev Dr Peter Matheson is Emeritus Professor, Knox Theological College, Dunedin.
