Street-Corner
Obedience
I cross Claudelands
Road
at the CBD end of the bridge
several times a week.
I know how the lights there work
and I know how the traffic flows,
and if no cars are heading southbound
in Victoria Street
I cross without waiting for the light.
Actually, I never consult the light.
The same at the mid-street traffic island.
If no cars are approaching,
or if they’re stopped at the light,
I just keep
walking.
Many people, however,
always push the microbe-encrusted silvery button
and stand there waiting for the walk-don’t-walk sign
to flash its little green walking man.
Sometimes these people give me the evil eye
for ignoring the lighted little-red-man symbol,
even when no
cars are in sight.
One half-bent-over fortyish man
once gave me a shy, conspiratorial, bad-teeth smile
and said with a nervous giggle,
as if I were the naughty kid he’d envied in year four,
‘Crossing before it changes green, eh?’
as I walked past
him
This raises the question
of the purpose of walk-don’t-walk lights.
Are they there to control traffic?
To ensure pedestrian safety?
Even when no traffic visibly threatens that safety?
Or is it to enforce Obedience?
Rebellion ― Sorta
It was 1986, if I remember correctly.
A 12-year-old boy showed me an editorial
he’d written
denouncing his school’s dress code’s
prohibition of boys wearing earrings to
school.
He submitted as his reasons
that it was old-fashioned
and the school needed to keep up with the
times
and to stop oppressing young people,
and also that the prohibition
was a violation of his free speech,
his earring being statement of rebellion
against the powerful,
expressing to the
world that he was a rebel.
I
agreed with him that the restriction was onerous,
as
it discriminated according to sex for no rational cause,
but
questioned other parts of his opinion.
For
one thing, it wasn’t a new, young-people-only thing,
as
I’d had friends, men then in their forties,
who’d
worn earrings twenty years previously.
For
another thing, I didn’t think it was young people,
or
rebels of any sort,
who
owned the gold and silver mines
or
otherwise made big bucks
from
extending the market for a type of jewellery,
or
by producing and marketing it,
but heartlessly
exploitative global corporations.
I
went to the trouble because
he
was in my Gifted and Talented Education journalism class.
I
wonder if it raised his consciousness.
Guilty of Contempt
Law courts throughout the world
–
in the US and the UK
and Russia
and China
and the Middle East and Mexico
and so on and so on –
with their solemn pomposity
and disregard for justice
are, overwhelmingly, jokes.
Only not funny ones.
As The Ice Melts
All of those people,
or almost all of them,
residents of islands and
lowlands,
ordinary people too poor to
escape,
thrashing about
fighting each other
over nothing
or what will soon be nothing
for the sake of something to
do,
as a distraction
from hopelessness.
So what?
They won’t have my surname.
If any of them went to school
with me,
or educated me on the
playground,
I won’t know it.
My children won’t know them.
So they’ll starve or murder or
survive
or all or none of the above
as our species culls itself
and those with money
extend their control over the
rest of us
who survive above the waterline,
employing thugs to bully and
murder
those for whom their smooth
bullshit
has become meaningless
and who therefore dare to
resist
as our species culls itself
with endless combat everywhere.
Pointing blame-fingers at each
other
as if that meant anything.
Think Small for Survival
The larger the scale of the
organisation,
whether it’s political or
economic or business
or social or religious or
educational,
the greater the certainty
that it will be inhumanly
oppressive.
World & Domestic Affairs
I watched Aljazeera on mute
and wondered in despair
about how so many people
all over the world
are able to treat each other
like less than human,
less than shit,
with such casual,
strutting, unfeeling violence,
for reasons,
when viewed from a distance,
that are blatantly stupid,
pointless, and ugly,
reasons that almost nobody
here in out-of-the-way
provincial New Zealand
would even know about
or think twice about if they
did.
Russians and Ukrainians
I find it hard to get as worked
up
over Russia
as much as I suppose I should.
Maybe it’s because I have
trouble telling them apart,
or because my grandparents fled
from Kiev
to get away from both
nationalities.
Better Polled Than Poleaxed
Even
though I was half drunk
and
in the mood to be left alone,
I
was happy to cooperate
when
the woman from the polling company
phoned
to ask for my opinions.
Responding
to a poll,
particularly
a political poll,
is
the only time that I feel that I have
any
meaningful power.
I
wouldn’t like to feel that way every day,
or
even particularly often, though.
Activism
A whole lot of what is wrong
with how people live,
and organise ourselves into
systems,
and work within those fucked-up
systems
to bring out the worst in
ourselves,
thereby being likely to make
the lives of our progeny living
hell,
has become, over the years,
unmistakably fucking obvious to
me,
but I have no idea
of what I can do about it
within my pathetically limited
skill set,
personal resources,
and personality limitations.
The
Still, Small Voice
The handsome young Israeli spokesman
fronted up to the cameras
to defend some horridly inhuman
Israeli government policies and actions,
his face saying that he knew
that what he was doing was wrong,
but that he was determined to defend it at
all costs,
and that he was terribly afraid.
Self-Confidence, Testosterone, & Righteousness
I see these TV images of men,
mostly young ones,
all over the world,
brandishing lethal objects,
bristling with egotistical
confidence and testosterone,
convinced of their own
righteousness,
gleefully bullying and killing
people who are weaker
and less in love with violence
than they are,
and wonder that I’ve managed to
survive
this long.
