Strange days

The tipping point

The concept of a ‘tipping point’ has many meanings from the simple concept of a water sculpture on Cuba Street Wellington NZ that sees buckets reaching their tipping point from an excess of water poured from a bucket higher up, to much more menacing ideas. All good fun especially for the inquisitive child who has never seen such a spectacle of water delights before. Would it were that this phrase begins and ends with this.

To state we live in post truth era implies that in some tangible way ‘truth’ as an ideal was ever universally understood or agreed upon. Ordinarily most people of my age would have learned their truth in no small way from religion and their church. Even those who have since renounced the idea of a supreme being cannot easily turn their backs on any of the teachings from the ‘good books’. ‘Do unto others as you would have them do to you’ is a golden rule that can be found in most written texts from whichever God we choose to follow.

Regarding other tipping points; a simple belief in a benign government crumbles at every turn when delving into the history of what has been committed in our name. The legacy of colonialism and the subjugation of indigenous peoples, theft of land, and appropriation of natural resources are commonplace across the globe.

The African continent bears witness to this since before Stanley uttered his “Dr. Livingstone, I presume!” There are a multitude of African nations leaders, too many to list, assassinated because they failed to do the bidding of their European or American masters. This truth stains the history of all colonial empires and it pervades to this day. South America, India, South-East-Asia Vietnam, Cambodia, Australia, and New Zealand are all tragic examples of colonial lust on steroids.

First Nations, Inuit, and Aboriginal people the world over have been reviled by our ‘civilised’ forebears, classed as sub human or animals and treated in some cases far worse than their oppressors dogs or horses. Habitually forced to adapt to the prevailing colonial way of life, or be trampled into the ground. All communal ownership of land was deemed an unacceptable and alien concept by settlers who wanted to carve up the land for private ownership and ban all Aboriginal peoples from their historic right of passage.

We have turned a blind eye on leaders of colonial countries who have treated local inhabitants of ‘new’ lands as flotsam and jetsam to be forcibly removed, murdered or corralled into ghetto quarters as in Diego Garcia, Kanaky (New Caledonia) or The Levant region. As the greed for land accelerated the corrals got smaller.

A tipping point of the last 20 years has been the removal of the pretence that the United Nations ever stood for anything. The five permanent members play lip service in upholding the principles of an ordered global community and have acted with seeming impunity as they partitioned the world into spheres of influence to plunder and do as they please.

The re-election of Trump in the United States, along with Putin’s self proclaimed life time leadership of Russia are grotesque examples of the hideous lie of enfranchisement that most ‘democratic’ nations beguile their citizens into thinking they have agency over.

We have NOT entered a new period of a few ‘bully boys’ taking over the world order, the gang of five have been doing it for CENTURIES. Emboldened by their collective power and rhetoric, the pretence of subterfuge is rendered unnecessary.

Our puppet leaders speak to us in crass, bombastic, misogynistic and often racist language and we roar our approval!

Tragic and alarming though the death of the three people in American cities have been, this is nothing new. Americans have been routinely killed by members of law enforcement for years for all sorts of minor infractions. It’s just that they were mostly Black or Latino.

These are strange days!

According to statistical evidence only 32% of Americans own a gun, and 42%-46% admit to living in a household that has a gun. Yet death by guns in America is at epidemic proportions compared to other similar economically advanced countries.

Why is a nurse carrying a licensed concealed weapon? Under what circumstances was it possible for a young White man openly carrying an assault rifle whilst walking down the middle of a street, discharging his weapon and killing two unarmed Black men, to then be acquitted of all charges? One wonders how many Kyle Rittenhouses are now masked and brandishing weapons with an ICE logo across their chests and backs.

These are strange days

Since October 7 the United States has provided military aid to Israel to the tune of between $17.9 to over $21.7 BILLION by October 2025. To house America’s homeless would cost between $11 to $30 BILLION. Did the homeless vote for this redirection of federal taxes?

A study by Yale epidemiologists found that providing Medicare for all would save 68000 lives per year whilst reducing U.S. healthcare spending by around 13% or $450 BILLION a year!

In a post recently it was questioned why in a country, exposed as guilty of the historic genocide of their First Nations people, who endured a civil war to free black people only to then continue to segregate blacks as second class citizen, beat, and murder them with impunity, anyone would now be surprised that this same country is moving towards fascism.

Alaska and Hawaii are two recent additions to the United States, both under dubious circumstances. The Hawaiian monarchy was overthrown in 1893 by American and European businessmen and subsequently annexed by the U.S. in 1898, leading to illegitimate state hood in 1959. That same year Alaska was admitted through a national poll. But the right of native Alaskans to vote was hogtied by Alaska’s literacy tests that effectively prevented most natives their legal rights. Only in 1970 were literacy tests removed. Once again local voices shut out of a decision making process that directly affected their lives.

The tiny island of Diego Garcia, originally uninhabited, became a leper colony by the French and then labour was used for coconut plantations. Following the Napoleonic wars the British controlled the island. Between 1968 and 1973, the complete population of 924 Chagossian inhabitants were forcibly removed by the British to make way for a military base. The United Nations voted overwhelmingly to support an international court of justice ruling that Britain must relinquish its administration of the Chagos archipelago to Mauritius, but the British ruled it non binding and have never complied. Diego Garcia remains the only inhabited island in the Indian Ocean region with a population of 4000 mostly military personnel. It has become a strategic post for American bomber command and is ironically called ‘The foot print of freedom’ by the US navy because of its shape!

For 3000 years the island archipelago now referred to as New Caledonia after Captain Cook ‘discovered’ it in 1774 was known as Kanaky and had some 70,000 Kanaks living there, unaware that Cooks discovery and European hegemony would change their lives forever. The French annexed the islands in 1853, but by this time European interests had already forcibly enslaved much of the kanak population as forced labour to Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, California, Fiji, Canada, Chile, and South Africa. Attempts by the Kanak people to gain independence have been met with violence, cruelty and subterfuge. In may 2024 the French government moved to allow all French citizens who had lived in the islands for ten years the right to vote on matters of the island independence.

When referencing these injustices and placing them in a recent historical context, why is anyone surprised that a narcissist, self absorbed, felon, who happens to be the President of America, demands he be given Iceland, no my bad, Greenland and then Canada as additions to Fortress America???????

THESE ARE STRANGE DAYS!!!!

Women and children along with the broad civilian population are blown to pieces in one corner of the globe and a section of the world community cries FOUL and leaps up and down about the uncivilised form of conflict being waged, whilst in another corner tens of thousands more innocents are obliterated and the same community becomes deaf, dumb, and blind to it all.

These are strange days where defacing instruments of war brands the perpetrators as terrorists along with all non violent protestors who hold up placards in support. Dangerous terrorists, old age pensioners, nurses, doctors, retired policemen, school teachers…..in short ordinary honest people. Arrested now in their thousands, all facing a potential 14 years imprisonment under British law.

And then there’s my own personal tipping point. Travelling the North Island of New Zealand and exploring inland and coastal settlements I’ve never come across before to find that Māori history remains a footnote in many town’s stories. Most notably is the Māori settlement of Paekākāriki. Miriona Utu Mutu Mira (Budge) was the last living land owner of 16 acres of land bordering the Wainui from the sea to the railway tracks. It was ancestral lands with her house and urupā within the borders. As WW2 exploded and New Zealand feared invasion from the Japanese, the government wanted her land to build an army training centre for American troops. Miriona initially blocked all attempts at forced sale, but eventually realised she might end up losing it all. In compensation the government allowed her to keep just 2.5 acres plus the urupā site.

I wandered around what is now Queen Elizabeth Park encountering the urupā up on the hill, now in bad repair and neglected. I read all the information in the park about the brave Americans and the privations they suffered as they prepared to repel the Japanese at Guadal Canal and the like. I stayed at the campsite unawares initially that this land was stolen from the rightful Māori owners and never given back. In all the mention and recorded histories in the park scant coverage speaks of the original owners. It has only been by my own research that I have come to know of the terrible injustice suffered by one Māori family at the hands of the crown and her agents. There is simply no reason why, that at the end of hostilities in the South Pacific, these ancestral lands could not have been returned to Miriona and her extended whanau.

It is only as I prepare to return to the South Island, back to a town where the Waitangi tribunal has just settled a longstanding dispute by Tangata Whenua over full recompense for failure to honour ‘The Tenths’, that I recognise both locally and globally we have a long, long, road to travel before people are put before profit. Before the protection of community interests are more important than the pursuit of personal wealth.

These are strange days, when I hear David Seymour’s rhetoric that we are all one people and that the law should treat us all equally. Let him tell that to the First Nations People of America and Canada, to the Aboriginals of Australia, Te Māori of Aotearoa, the Kanaks of Kanaky (New Caledonia) the Irish under British rule, the Palestinians of Gaza and The West Bank, along with all other oppressed minority ethnic groups the world over.

The tipping point must surely be just around the corner in whatever part of the world you live!