Month: February 2007

Taking Action: You. Now.

Happy New Year! Yeah, I know it is the eve of March. I’ve lost two months, and I’m figuring a lot of readers out there are much the same. January and February can be very demanding months in New Zealand. It can take a while to get settled into the new year. Are we settled in yet?
So, a question. How many readers of this blog decided that in 2007 they would do something about the state of the world? Something environmental or community-based or political? Just – something?
And… how many of you have actually done something so far?
This is not to nag. I haven’t either, yet. But the problem is bigger than a busy summertime. Our collective failure to get things in motion is one of the problems of modern life, where we have awareness and we have intent and yet we still can’t quite translate that into action.
Last year I posted about Small Group Actions. The idea, in short, is to make it easier to get something worthwhile underway by doing it in a small short-term group (rather than alone, or as part of a big organization). Starting a Small Group Action is easy:

  • choose an issue you want to do something about.
  • email some friends and say ‘lets meet to do something’
  • turn up to the meeting with the SGAguide

The first step is easy – get together with your friends – and after you’ve done that you have some momentum, and also group dynamics to keep things ticking over. No-one has to make a scary long-term commitment – at the end of the action, the group dissolves. Short and sweet.
The full SGA idea is still in development, but the principles are robust. The posts on SGA last year generated much more feedback than anything else I’ve ever posted online. A lot of people were keen to give it a go.
It’s the new year. If you’re sick of just being a wallflower and want to get up and dance – get into it. You already care about something. Just email some friends about meeting up. It will take twenty seconds. Do it now. Begin.
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As before, I welcome emails or comments from anyone who gets something underway or wants to talk about something in the SGA material. I’ll try my best to make sense of things!
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Wondering where to start? Well, if you care at all about environmental stuff, particularly climate change and peak oil, why not kick off with the Draft NZ Energy Strategy? A group of three or four people can share out the reading and put together a submission in only a couple of meetings, easily in time for the deadline in a month. You don’t have to go to Parliament like i did, either – just send in a letter. And these submissions really can have an impact on what happens – far more than you might expect.
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Small Group Action Guide: SGAs and lots of action ideas, all in 3 pages. PDF, 92K.
SGA 1: Sekret Project Revealed
SGA 2: The Power Of Groups
SGA 3: Action Of Commitment
SGA 4: Concrete and Consensual
SGA 5: To Do What, Exactly?
SGA 6: Give It A Try

Newspapers Are Love

manflirtedwithwomen.jpg
This triumph of the subeditor’s art was clipped from the Dominion Post sometime last year (didn’t copy down the date).
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And while I am at it, an actual quote from an early foray into journalism (The Evening Post, July 24 1989):

Morgan: I feel guilty when I am entertained by watching midget wrestling.

Belay That Oscar

I am going to watch the whole Oscars shebang unabridged and unhinged with a couple of good friends who share the madness. However, to fit in with their timetable, we will begin our viewing at 10pm our time. That’s a full 5 hours or so after the ceremony ends. I am determined to stay unspoiled on the winners and losers, so the shenanigans can proceed without hindrance.
As a side effect of this, I will not be repeating last year’s stupidity wherein I got splendidly drunk by myself and badly livejournalled the Oscars as it happened. I am sure you will all be deeply, deeply saddened by this absence in your Oscars experience.
Instead, I direct you to the always-brilliant Fametracker for your Oscars awesome – my favourite every year is Best Picture Nominees Turned TV Series.
(And The Onion has their wonderful Celebrity Reporter Jackie Harvey live-blogging the whole thing. Item! Sure to be 100% factual.)
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It is long, long past time that I get this bloody novel finished. I am swearing off social activities that are not weddings or funerals until it is done. So I have decreed. Expect shorter blog entries as well. (Audience sighs in relief.)

Carnival Time

I am mighty excited about the Cuba Street Carnival this Saturday. Many music acts! Random chaos everywhere! People not cars on the city streets!
Curious how this follows so closely on from the Rugby Sevens tournament, which is the other Wellington ‘Carnival’. The notion of a combination of the two fascinates me; I can’t decide if they’d cancel each other out or kick off an exponential positive feedback loop.
I am in the midst of novel-writing so I shall not linger. Instead, I direct you all to WellUrban‘s post about it, which is full of goodness and much better-informed than me.
By the by, I mentioned seeing Strike perform earlier in the week. During the interview bit they said they would play during the Carnival, but I can’t find any evidence of this on the Carnival website. Anyone know the truth of the matter? They were incredible and it would be great to see them again.

[mediawatch] The Listener Gets It Right

The New Zealand Listener has been such an important part of my NZ media intake that for the first year I was living in Scotland I asked my family to post it over to me. However, the magazine has come in for some stick under new editor Pamela Stirling. Stirling has shifted the magazine’s politics into the centre (as opposed to more-or-less leftie, as it used to be) and shifted its target audience from those concerned about society to those concerned about themselves.
However, it’s nice to see that the old Listener hasn’t completely disappeared. The Feb 24-March 2 issue, available now, might have a garish piggy-bank cover titled ‘Saving: The Facts you can bank on, but inside is an absolute gem of journalism: The Killers Among Us.
The article begins:

In the aftermath of the recent actions of murderer Graeme Burton six months after his parole from prison, many people have wondered how the Parole Board could have got it so wrong. Some politicians have even advocated an end to parole for violent offenders. And yet, of those 226 killers, more than 90 percent have not re-offended. These are three of them.

The article goes on to extensively profile three murderers who are now out in society and have not re-offended. Each of them gets plenty of opportunity to speak, candidly, about their experiences, about what in the system didn’t work (lack of support, lack of training, lack of options once out) and what did (two of them mention the volunteer-driven Prisoners Aid and Rehabilitation Society as a lifesaver – I’d never heard of it). These aren’t heartwarming sentimental stories. The article isn’t trying to sell us a fairy tale. These three sound just like I would expect a reformed murderer to sound like. I’ll go further – they sound like I would *want* a murderer to sound like, down the line.

People ask me if I’ve got a criminal record and I always tell them, ‘Yes, I have.’ They have every right to ask. But I’ve been out 12 years. No one’s got the right to forever judge us as criminals… we’ve done our time and we want to change. I can’t undo what I’ve done… But you don’t look at the past, you look at the future…. It’s going to be hard. But I’m going to keep trying.

If we believe at all in the idea of rehabilitation, then surely this is exactly what we’re aiming for?
Of course, part of the problem with discourse around this issue is that people don’t believe in rehabilitation. The Sensible Sentencing Trust people vilify criminals as the Other, a different kind of human to me, and their crimes arise inevitably from their twisted nature. Many in politics are eager to adopt this troubling narrative, because it is an easy sell to a voter troubled by crime in the community. I would not commit crime, the logic goes, but these people did, so they are not like me, and therefore we must be protected from them.
The article gets to the root of this as well. Devon Polaschek, criminal psychology lecturer at Victoria University, is interviewed and given plenty of room to tear that idea to shreds.

And, says Polaschek, almost anyone has the capacity to kill. “We think that if you have regard for human life, it provides a barrier to taking it. But most of us can suspend that regard. We may care a lot about that person, but when we’re very angry we have the capacity to hurt.

While she’s at it, Polaschek briskly demolishes the perception of murderers as likely to reoffend, and attacks the lack of support for offenders within prison and after they leave it. It’s a splendid platform for ideas that seem like common sense to me, and yet are so often entirely missing from public discourse. Some may level charges of “ivory tower academics” who are “out of touch”, but such charges rely on exactly the same magical thinking that believes crime reveals criminals to be inhuman beasts. Polaschek is right.
But it is the murderers themselves whose words resonate. Murder has always been with us, and presumably always will be. There will always be murderers in our society. This article shows us why we should not give up on them.
Good work, Listener.

Sidebar Changes

Added some new folk to the sidebar, all long overdue. I’ve succumbed to my usability conscience and renamed many of the links to make them more comprehensible to people who aren’t me. (Not all of them though.) And to save space I’ve jammed a lot of links side-by-side when I could mentally justify it.
There are now two people in the hip cool rebels list who I’ve never met, Stephen/Spleen (well, we met briefly a decade ago), and Tom/Wellurban. I really should remedy that sometime.
I love my sidebar. Do yourself a favour and have an explore through some of the links.

What’s The Matter With W Cres?

W Crescent is in the news again. A man was in court yesterday facing charges for stabbing his three tiny children (ages 8 weeks, 18 months and three years). The children all survived, which has to be some sort of miracle.
W Crescent is a street in Naenae, in Lower Hutt – my home town. It’s not a particularly remarkable street, maybe a hundred or hundred-twenty properties. Not a lot of money, sure, but that hardly sets it apart from countless other streets in the city and the country. (The new nationwide initiative to formally certify ‘underclass streets‘ has passed Wilkie Cres over, as well.)
In fact, W Cres is entirely unremarkable. I only know where it is because a friend of mine lives there. K is a wonderful guy, been a friend for a long time, and just the other day randomly gifted me with a half-dozen vintage Ren & Stimpy mugs and glasses.
So when this stabbing happened in W Cres, I sat up. That is K’s street. And the weird thing is, that little street already has a reputation for terrible things. It has been the venue for some horrible, horrible crimes in the last six or seven years. Not just your garden-variety drunken violence, but seriously weird stuff that has to involve some mental illness and dissociation from reality. A severed head in the bathtub was the last one that made the national news in a big way, but it wasn’t the only such event. (I’ve tried googling up details but can’t find anything – the fact that there are no searchable NZ news archives on the web is utterly ridiculous.)
W Cres has an incredibly high incidence of murder and grievous bodily harm, and there doesn’t seem to be any reason for it. Just one of those statistical bumps. Heck, the family in the current incident had only moved there three weeks ago! But as much as I rationally understand that it’s just random, it troubles me anyway. I want to look for a cause. I want to understand why bad things keep happening there, so they don’t have to happen any more. Bad feng shui? Corruption in the pipes? Vengeful ghosts?
New Zealand has issues with mental health, particularly depression. We have issues with drugs, particularly alcohol and methamphetamine. There are a lot of problems simmering away under the surface. And for whatever reason, W Cres is one place where these issues keep bubbling to the surface.
So, what’s the matter with W Cres? I guess only this: exactly the same things as everywhere else in this country.

Spoiled For Choice; And, A Lounge Project

Splendid Wellington February continues. As I write it’s another glorious clear-skied sunny day without wind. Its nice, and also a bit sinister. Wellington’s wind is a major part of its character, and we’ve been without it for weeks. Where the heck has it gone?
And every year Wellington packs in more summer parties. On Saturday there were no less than three major events around town – the opening of the new Dowse museum in the Hutt, complete with big free concert with some great performers; the Island Bay festival, with its own free concert with some great performers; and the Fringe Picnic, with a wonderful free concert with some great performers. Truly spoiled for choice, we Wellingtonians are. It’s bloody marvellous.
Saturday night Cal and I stopped in at the bar/foyer of the Paramount movie theatre where a free Fringe thing was going on, the Chit Chat Lounge. Styled like a late-night talkshow, with guests along to plug their fringe shows and give short performances. It was a lot of fun, with a happy atmosphere and some nice wit on display. The final guests when we dropped in were percussion outfit Strike, who finished up a fun interview with a blistering set on an array of Rarotongan drums. Wild.
This reminds me of plans I have been developing off-and-on for some years. Wellington could sustain something like this long-term; a regular night where folk would turn up to drink some drinks and engage with some cool new kulcha. Hosts would banter and develop running gags over weeks and months; guests would come out to plug their albums/plays/novels/clubs/etc. Some of Welly’s enormous creative output could be put on stage (music videos from the Handle the Jandal competition, short films from any of the various short film competitions). I’d schedule it on Friday night, starting at 11pm, somewhere where the bar starts slowing down at 11 as people head off to the more late-night venues. There’s loads of people sifting about in Wellington around midnight on a Friday, looking for something to do that isn’t dancing, karaoke or a late movie – an untapped market. It would totally work.
It would also be a heck of a lot of work to put together, and you’d be relying on a portion of bar receipts to fund it, so it would be a tough challenge. Unless it could get sponsors or advertisers, or go out on “Wellington’s TV station”. Of course it would be webcast live.
Someone should do this. Go on.

Best Thing I’ve Read All Week

Sometimes the way someone expresses him- or herself gives me much pleasure. This is one of those times. Someone named Terry Eagleton on the limitations of Richard Dawkins’ atheism is worth a read for this very reason – it’s beautiful stuff to read, and certainly on the money with regards to the limits of Dawkins’ comprehension of his pet subject.
Samples:

For Judeo-Christianity, God is not a person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is. Nor is he a principle, an entity, or ‘existent’: in one sense of that word it would be perfectly coherent for religious types to claim that God does not in fact exist… He is the answer to why there is something rather than nothing. God and the universe do not add up to two, any more than my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects.

To say that [God] brought [the universe] into being ex nihilo is not a measure of how very clever he is, but to suggest that he did it out of love rather than need.

Jesus… was a joke of a Messiah. He was a carnivalesque parody of a leader who understood, so it would appear, that any regime not founded on solidarity with frailty and failure is bound to collapse under its own hubris.

It’s wonderful, and it made me read it when I really should be working on stuff. You should go read it too. Here’s the link again. All this via Making Light which you should all be reading by now but I know you aren’t.

Before Select Committee

Today I sat in front of the NZ Parliament’s Local Government and Environment Select Committee, alongside Billy, Scott and Katherine, and spoke to our submission on the Waste Minimisation (Solids) Bill.
It was quite nerve-wracking. I didn’t feel the sensation of nervousness, that anxious stomach-churning short-breath thing – no sensation like that at all. But I was reacting like it anyway, stumbling to hold what I was saying together and stay on top of what was going on. It’s weird how stress works, it just seems to remove a bunch of working space in your head so you’re desperately trying to make do with only a sliver of mental whiteboard. Tricky.
For all that, it went well. Our message was received, I think, and my less-than-smooth delivery would have only helped our credibility. Tricky questions from the exact two members I was expecting tricky questions from were handled acceptably. For my own personal satisfaction I wish I’d handled it with the ease I know I’m capable of, but heck, I don’t have anything to moan about really.
Actually, I was surprised to discover this felt so different to other times when I’ve spoken to groups. Will introspect and try and figure out why.
So that was one of the things I did today. It was quite exciting really. If I ever find myself in a similar situation I think I’ll be much more confident!
(This was a small group action, by the way. Remember those? More on this theme to come…)
EDIT: Billy has written about it too, see his post here.
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Happy birthday to the Alligator…