I usually very much enjoy Michele A’Court’s column. She can enjoy a good laugh at herself but mainly talks about things that are within my personal experience. On Saturday she began: “I have been trying very hard not to write about my cat”. We knew a cat story was coming.

It was sweet, the sort of stuff that cat lovers could smile and nod to. A bit of history about Jim (his name), who is now 20 years old (“…he is so deaf that his meow has become a shout”), his convalescent activities (sleeping 23 hours a day in five favourite spots), and other things immediately familiar to cat owners.

The second half of the article turns to the lessons Jim can teach us all – and I for one am listening. I won’t try to summarise or paraphrase it; it’s so simply and well written that it deserves verbatim reproduction. So, hopefully not treading on anyone’s copyright too heavily, here’s what brought a lump to my throat and a wave of relief to my mind:

———————

I have days when engaging with the world leaves me almost unable to breathe.  Retrospective surveillance legislation, voluntary student unions and the collapse of the world economy can leave me gasping for air with the bewilderment, anger or fear.

When that happens, I disengage from the world and engage with Jim.  Stroking and nuzzling him don’t help clarify the issues or find solutions, but they make me move more slowly, soften my tone and breathe.  And once you notice that Jim is happy with the world because you are in it, you can’t help but feel a little bit happy with the world too.

So for 20 years, he has been teaching me about living.  Now, he is teaching me about dying.  Our vet has diagnosed him with cancer, saying he may have as little as a week or as much as a month.  That was two weeks ago, and he shows no signs yet of being either ill or unhappy.

Of course, he doesn’t know that he is dying.  He only knows that he is now living on a permanent diet of special treats – salmon, tuna pasta, grated cheese and an open invitation to lick the inside of popcorn bags.

He has no loose ends that need tying up, and feels none of the grief of saying goodbye.  He is not bothered by how few tomorrows he may have.  He just knows that today is a beautiful thing.

He has lived a good life and we are hoping to give him a good death, not just as practice for ourselves, but a little.

———————-

Thanks, Michelle, for sharing that with us. It’s made my day a little better.

Although I don’t particularly enjoy seeing txt-speak creeping into print advertisements and dominating facebook postings, I’m not about to run a campaign against such modern laxity.

To a degree, I can go along with the opinion developing among some educators that it’s more important that a writer gets across his or her message clearly than that their spelling, punctuation and grammar are perfect. Even using txt spelling in answers in exams? I’m not keen, but can see a case for it in some cases.

Until, that is, I see something like this. Following is an example, typed in exactly as it was sent, written by a middle manager of a local territorial authority, and tabled at a local community board meeting. Reading this, I decided it is an example of ‘one bridge too far’.

(Eplanatory note: “decks”, “memorial” and “ledger” are the names of three of Motueka’s public parks with playgrounds, and I’ve removed the name of the recipient.)

“hi [.....]

yes dont get me wrong decks by far the main playground in mot. I saying i hav not done anything re planning or arranging public meetings as i feel memorial should be considered first, plus i need funding confirmed. I was working on ledger from your survey and request but hav put this on hold. I hav a large amount of projects on the go at present to which i can not drop to start decks with no real budget. I also spoke about trying to apply for 100k for decks. Decks has an average condition rating and fit for another 5 years or more, not saying leave it that long.”

This is a manager at one official body talking to and instructing another, in order that the receiver can understand and act. One can only hope that the recipient was able to interpret it correctly.

People in such management positions must learn how to write less lazily, else we will continue to be informed and led by sloppy thinking and mangled messages.

I’m referring to the plight being experienced by many small business owners whose premises are in the no-go area of Christchurch and who are seeing their buildings being demolished without warning and without the opportunity of first retrieving items of value, even when that could have been done quite safely.

The results of Christchurch’s Feb 22 earthquake are sad enough, with the loss of lives affecting thousands who knew non-survivors and the destruction of many tens of thousands of much-loved family homes. We don’t need to cause any extra significant pain and hardship to people than we need to.

I have several connected points to make here, so bear with me if this gets a bit rambly.

First, I have great sympathy for people who’ve lost (or expect to lose) their businesses as a result of the quake. Now I know that we can always say that our priorities must be right, that at least they’re alive and have their friends and family around them. But life can and should mean more than that, and to say that other things such as businesses built up over years of hard work are less important, and can be dispensed with in the name of “safety first” and obeying the law, is too short-sighted for me.

What many Christchurch people, in particular those involved in the vital small business sector or living in the CBD, are experiencing now shows precisely the downside of having a national state of emergency in place. Sure, a state of emergency does mean that skilled organisations and teams can be mobilised to tackle the immediate disaster situation, but the downside is that you get an unaccountable group in control which can over-reach itself and trump common sense in the name of a risk-averse “safety first” principle mixed with a “we’re in control here” attitude.

I’m sure that the Civil Defence and Search and Rescue people, as individuals, have done a unenviable and valuable job in bravely attacking the immediate problems and reducing obvious dangers. But it’s entirely likely that this new-found sense of importance, particularly by Civil Defence heads (as seen on recent TV interviews), may be skewing their vision. For so many years CD have been ignored or quietly laughed at with their warnings that we should be ready for some “big disastrous event” (yeah, right), and now they’ve been proved right! And with a state of emergency in place allowing them to be answerable to no-one, they’re making sure that everyone knows who’s boss and why they should have been taken more seriously.

This may sound very harsh, given the brave work that is being done on the ground. But when I hear and read the fast-growing number of cases where CD and the forces that answer to them (army, police etc) are simply not giving any thought to the plight of business owners who just need to get valuable material from their premises before those buildings are knocked down. The stories being told show an inflexible cold heartedness that angers me and makes me fear that the rebuilding of the morale of Christchurch businesses will take longer than officials believe.

CD is justifying not allowing business owners access on the grounds that “safety is paramount”. Well I believe that it’s not paramount. Happiness and human spirit and meaningful life is paramount, and people need to be able to live with an informed level of risk, now and always. That’s what life is about. You can never make it entirely safe.

The second disappointing aspect of the management of people’s livelihoods in Christchurch is the lack of effort in matching up knowns with unknowns, in the name of getting the demolition job over as soon as possible. Again, many stories emerge of owners of buildings, businesses, cars and other property not being informed before demolition occurs. Officials say they do their best to find out who owns what. Police asked owners of cars caught up in the no-go areas to register their names so they can be given back their cars. In both cases, all that information is in fact easily known and if it cannot be accessed quickly by authorities then there is something seriously wrong with their IT systems.

Ownership of all these things are on basic computers – the core databases of councils, business organisations, Inland Revenue and car registration. There can be simply no excuse for dealing to property before owners are contacted. If it takes another day to wait for a message left on an answer phone to be responded to, then so be it – one day’s delay in demolishing a building is far better than destroying expensive assets and future businesses prospects just because a demolition crew is ready and waiting to make money out of another quick and easy job, and officials are too bothered to reschedule.

The rush to knock it all down seems too desperate – or is it that CD, which is supposed to be responsible for all decisions on what stays and goes, wants to make as much impact as it can before the state of emergency is lifted?

To say that demolition firms acting without authority can be reprimanded and fined is an insult to the people whose livelihood is suddenly lost on a whim, and whose outlook on life may be negatively shaped for the rest of their life.

It’s fair for CD and Search and Rescue to want to minimise the chance of people entering the zone being hit by falling bricks etc, but if just a bit of time and care could be taken to ensure owners, accompanied by SAR experts, could recover accessible vital assets before demolition, then such risks would pay off in the longer term in the rebuilding process.

I read of a dentist who reportedly was required to access (accompanied) his damaged CBD surgery to get dental records for body identification purposes, but has since been denied access to retrieve assets. If true, that is simple perverse and daft.

Be safe, yes, but don’t use that as pretext for keeping people from living in a risky world. The people prepared to take managed and informed risks to enable them to start rebuilding their businesses by retrieving business assets are the people we need to start rebuilding Christchurch. Don’t drive them away through risk-averse officialdom.

Providing a glimmer of hope, this morning’s paper said that as a result of the growing anger among business owners, Civil Defence is pausing for a few days in its headlong demolition programme to see if it can put find better ways of working with businesses in a cooperative manner. Fingers crossed they may come to their senses and see the bigger picture.

For those not that familiar with the term Catch-22, it comes from a satirical book set in the latter stages of World War 2 and is now a general critique of bureaucratic operation and reasoning. Its general use is to refer to no-win or double-bind situations where circular logic says that in order to achieve something you have to do or prove the opposite, which in fact prohibits you from doing what you wanted to. (Well that’s the best explanation I can give.)

Best demonstrated by some examples. Here are some from recent experiences recounted or known to me.

Someone I know in the UK wants to emigrate to NZ. The form filling and actions involves a daunting list, but one of them – which they are told is necessary before their application is approved, denied or deferred until later – is to sell their house over there. Now who is going to sell their house without first being guaranteed that the result will be positive? (This one seems to me almost too ridiculous to be true, and it is possible that they are being misinformed.)

Next I met a local resident who is not an NZ passport holder, who is booked to travel to Tonga for a holiday. They’ve spent weeks trying to get a visa and after clearing several “interesting” hurdles they’re told that they be considered for a visa until they’ve proved they have paid-for accommodation in Tonga. Naturally my friends have not yet paid for their accommodation (actually they were to be staying somewhere for free anyway) until they know their visa will be granted.

The Christchurch earthquake has provided plenty of good Catch-22 situations which are not at all funny to those affected.

First there was the whole thing around getting information about emergency services and information via the media. The people who needed this most were the people who had no power, and therefore no internet, TV, phone (including cellphones once the batteries went flat) and even radio (who has battery-powered “transistors” these days?). Being told on the TV of web addresses to access vital services was pointless when those isolated didn’t even know that half the city was crumbling.

I’m not meaning to be harsh to the TV and radio people – what else could they do? But for us who were not experiencing the isolation and horrors that the eastern suburban dwellers must have gone through for days, even weeks, before they got basic services restored, it’s a bit rich to say they should have got off their backsides and made the vital calls.

It is said (though this may not be entirely true) that the emergency service providers in the first week or so based the distribution of their operations on how many calls for help they received from which areas, without actually getting out to check the situation in the suburbs. That’s a classic form of Catch-22: how could isolated residents without power (and phone or internet) make their needs known? They probably couldn’t even drive into the city to tell authorities in person.

A lot of (very understandable) angst surfaced pretty quickly among particularly business owners with CBD premises, forbidden from checking their offices, damaged or not, to retrieve some basic materials such as computers and files that could allow them to restart business somewhere else. Then this past week some of them were allowed to get in, provided they could authenticate their ownership with a rates bill or some other property document.

Imagine being in the quake, being tossed around like a rag doll and hearing walls crumbling around you. Of course the first thing you’d do, wouldn’t you, would be to go to the filing cabinets and hunt through for your latest rates notice to prove who you were so you could get back in! Yeah, right. Catch-22. (The fact that business owners now seem to be getting access suggests that this rule is being applied more loosely than initially announced.)

The biggest Catch-22 situation in New Zealand these days is firmly embedded, centre stage, in the Marine and Coastal Areas Act going through parliament (replacing or, more accurately, updating the Foreshore and Seabed Act). It’s the bit that says that Maori/iwi can once again go to the courts to prove their uninterrupted customary use of a coastal area and thereby obtain customary title.

In order to do this, the bill says they must be able to prove unbroken exclusive use of that section of foreshore and seabed since before European settlement.

If ever there was a no-win, double-bind, circular impossibility this is it. The very thing that has many pakeha spooked out of their brains into campaigns of racist fear-mongering and conspiracy theory is that Maori could use customary title to make parts of the beach out of bounds to non-Maori. Because Maori have never asserted exclusive use of any coastal areas in the past, and in fact have more often than not seen such areas confiscated from them and sold into non-Maori hands for exclusive private use, there are virtually no parts of the coast that will ever come close to satisfying the “continuous exclusive” condition.

Catch-22! No wonder Hone’s crowd are angry.

A few things arose this month that prompted attempts at commentary by myself but, as I said, I lacked the steam in the boiler. So rather than attempting profound analysis or detailed solutions, here are a few (mainly unoriginal) passing thoughts.

1. Christmas has gone down a little uneasily for me ever since my childhood passed. It’s not that I despise it or have an ideological position against it; it’s just that the events leading up to the day and the occasions (including boxing day gatherings) themselves often feel forced and with tense undercurrents that don’t allow me to easily let go and enjoy the moment.

Or maybe I’ve simply lost the art of taking everything at face value and enjoying the moment.

Every Christmas since the 2007 financial crisis I’ve been annoyed by the sadly predictable news reports that this Christmas will be a bad one – because people won’t be spending so much on presents. This is the most obvious expression of one of the major problems the world is facing – that we seemingly cannot join the dots to create the picture showing the incongruity between trying to build a sustainable economic system and buying and consuming (or throwing away) ever more “stuff”. The expectation and pressure to shop shop shop at this time of the year simply overcomes any appeal to logic.

I know that retailers have to live also, but must the economy go beyond the brink and collapse totally before we finally work it out and “get it”?

I’m not a scrooge saying we should not buy friends and loved ones nice presents at this time of the year, but surely most of us can be sufficiently mature to make the presents (a) useful and (b) limited in number. Especially children should be encouraged to be thankful for a smaller number of presents – they’re the ones who model our behaviour into the future.

I believe that there is merit in treating Christmas as a time to get together, eat some good food, exchange one present each, and enjoy time off work if you can. More significant present giving should focus on birthdays, when there is something to celebrate. This approach would also serve to smooth the income for retailers, spreading purchases over a year of many customers’ birthdays rather than relying on one huge present binge.

2. New Zealand readers will remember the furore (not a cliché: there really was a lot of widespread, real anger) back a month ago about the decision by the Returned Soldiers Association (RSA) to contract an Australian supplier using Chinese factories to make the Anzac Day red poppies that the RSA uses each year to raise funds for veterans.

I was going to write at the time about the folly of this decision (by some CEO doubtless brought in to make the fundraising more business-like), but everyone else and their dog got in before me in letters to the editor. So, nothing new here, except to comment that this was a very good example of why business people who adhere to competitive, free market principles often don’t make the best decisions in non-commercial situations.

They took the manufacturing contract from a Christchurch workshop that employs intellectually handicapped people to do something they love and take pride in, and placed said contract in the hands of the employers of cheap overseas labour, on the expectation that the money saved would provide more net profit for the veterans. They gave no thought, obviously, to what us donors – the majority of Kiwis – thought about cutting the local intellectually handicapped people out of the process. Forget about whether the new makers were to be Chinese, Romanians or wherever – it’s the disregard for another local charity that angered me and other poppy-buyers. This was taking competition for the charity dollar too far.

The result will be that they will sell far fewer poppies, making less money for everyone including their own veterans. Hopefully another result will be that the CEOs of such charities will learn a big lesson.

3. I was also going to comment on the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) negotiations which have started, purportedly with the aim of opening up free trade between a stack of countries around the Pacific rim, including New Zealand and United States.

Some pretty interesting stuff was published recently on what the TPP really meant or would mean if it goes ahead under terms that the US appears to prefer. Despite being shrugged off by free-market ideologues as ‘highly unlikely’, the thought of the US demanding legislative changes in NZ over such policies as drug buying (Pharmac) in order for them to allow us ‘free’ access to their markets (except, of course, their key agricultural ones) is a worrying thought for those who regard sovereignty as important. Just look at what happened when Warner Bros leaned on us!

Hopefully the reason that the TPP debate has quietened down in recent weeks is not just the pre-Christmas wind-down, but rather that the warnings being sounded by people like Jane Kelsey in her book are being heard and heeded by John Key and co.

I believe in free trade between countries. I also believe in everyone being nice to each other, in motherhood, perfect grammar and everyone driving considerately. Truly free trade may be an ideal, but it’ll never be a reality while nations and corporations have unequal resources, clout and desire to dominate.

The way I view it, people are either grateful for what they have or are, or they’re never happy. You see it in people who appreciate the contributions and the good in others, who have a positive disposition, against those who must always see the worst in things or other people. You see it in those who usually try to praise versus those who usually look for imperfections and complain.

Recently an old friend said something which cast this distinction in a slightly different way, making it a little easier for me to express what I mean. We hadn’t seen each other for over a year and he was telling me of the joys and challenges of his present work as a manager of a small group of staff working in a “caring” profession (ie, social work).

He commented that half of his staff thought the world owed them a living while the other half felt they owed the world a living. These two attitudes provided the challenges and the joys he was talking about.

I thought this was a great way of viewing people’s attitudes in general. People who I see as showing predominantly negative and mean-spirited attitudes usually seem to think that they are owed a living. They’re sure there’s something better around the corner, if only all these other annoying and demanding things would stop happening to them. They are infected with the modern bug of “entitlement” and inalienable rights. Me first.

The others, the generous-minded souls, are mainly grateful of the good things that have happened to them – their luck in being born into good circumstances; the things that others have done for them over the years; the little delights that make each day worth living.

Although they don’t actually owe the world a living, these people acknowledge and appreciate the good things that have happened to them over the years and are happy to keep the circle going by paying back to their families, friends and communities.

The decision itself is okay. I’m not too worried one way or the other on who should give way and whether New Zealand should align its rules with the rest of the world, as long as we all do it together. This change makes sense, and if statistics suggest it will save a few hundred accidents a year then we should do it.

What’s stupid about it is the timing. Why does it take 18 months to implement? Okay, there will need to be pamphlets and advertisements written, printed and ready for publication and distribution. That should take a week or two at the most. I can see absolutely no other reason to let it hang around for 18 months. Please, Mr Joyce, tell me what I’m missing here!!

In fact, making the announcement – and fuelling so much debate and news coverage – this far ahead of the date of change sows one extra seed of doubt into the decision-making of drivers who already have to assess various factors in deciding when they can and can’t turn with other passing traffic around. ‘I’ve read about the old and new rules – which was the old one and which is the new one?’ ‘Has the rule begun yet?’ ‘Does that other driver know which is the current rule or is (s)he also slightly unsure like me?’

Go ahead and make the change. But either make it in 18 months and don’t talk about it till close to the time, or make the change next week so my current attention on who goes when is focussed on now and not on something 18 months away.

And anyhow, if that many accidents (and perhaps some deaths) will be avoided with the change, then surely the quicker it is done the better for us all.

I repeat: Mr Joyce, either tell thinking people why the huge delay, or change your announcement to make the changeover this month, while it’s fresh in our minds.

Although we were awoken by the attenuated shaking in Motueka (some 350km away), we were not affected in any way. But we have life-long dear friends in Christchurch, so we’re having chats with most of them now that power and phones are back on, and the feeling is universal – that they’re only just starting to get to terms with the fact that their routine lives will not be the same as before for many weeks or even months ahead.

It’s not just a sad story in a movie but it’s real and has consequences, specially for people struggling to make a living already, whose businesses may close for weeks or altogether. Our own emotions, we’re finding, are quite strong as we ponder that — plus feeling very relieved that we up here have escaped.

The charge that a rail network in New Zealand needs to be subsidised and therefore should be scrapped just doesn’t wash with me.

Most of its services cannot pay their own way because they cannot compete with road services (trucks for freight, cars and buses for passengers).  But do roads pay their way? Of course not!

We all heavily subsidise roads through taxes. If all road users (freight firms and private vehicles) were to pay for ALL the costs for the creation and maintenance of all roads, through some all-enveloping road user charge (such as tolls based on vehicle weight) rather than through taxes, then we would be not only screaming at the cost but also looking for some alternative – including public transport and rail.

The trouble is, we have a fundamental, rarely questioned assumption that roads should be there so we can drive on them whenever and wherever we wish, and that the government must make them available seemingly for nothing. This assumption has an obvious corollary – that alternative transport modes are add-ons to our car-based lifestyles and must therefore pay their way (because we rarely if ever use them directly).

This is feeble but sort-of okay until we start to look out a decade or more into the future, with fuel costs continuing to rise and roads getting increasingly clogged with heavy trucks (requiring higher-capacity roads at huge cost to subsiding taxpayers). It seems obvious to me that the realisation will eventually dawn that winding down rail for short-term, political reasons has been foolhardy.

So then we will find ourselves debating the seemingly prohibitive costs of buying land and re-laying tracks to build or re-open parts of the network that were sold, left to ruin, poorly maintained or built over.

Christchurch city shows one pretty obvious example of how hindsight is easy but paying for winding back abandoned networks is horrendous. Once it had a tramway system, now all gone. The cost of re-establishing one small part of it (for tourists) has been huge, and this would be magnified greatly if old suburban routes were rebuilt. Much running argument in that city centres on the need (and huge cost) of a light rail system to serve the future. If only all those abandoned networks had not been thrown away, it may have been possible!

And now we have the prospect of closing down existing smaller railway services that cannot pay their way. Doubtless Kiwirail will also sell some of the land these lines occupy in order to free up more money, making it even harder and more expensive for the lines to ever be rebuilt when they do become potentially desirable to run.

I don’t like being told “I told you so” by anyone else, so I prefer not to say it to others when what is obvious to me, but is negative lefty thinking to others, turns out to actually happen. And generally you can hardly be pleased to be right, because what you’re right about too often results in a mess that you really, really don’t want.

But every now and then things happen that cause you to sit up, put two and two together and say: We are going in the wrong direction! It’s obvious. Why could you not see that this was going to be the result? I did tell you so.

Two recent events have made it abundantly clear that unsustainable activities eventually have downstream costs which even the cheerleaders of relentless economic growth acknowledge are horrendous.

Now I didn’t predict the eruption of that volcano in Iceland, and the ensuing disruption to air traffic. And I didn’t predict the accident at the oil rig off the US coast. So I won’t say ‘I told you so’ about these specific events (though some people actually could).

But what I have thought, spoken and written about for many years, and am being proven correct often enough, has been that the more we allow ourselves as residents of this planet to become dependent upon economic growth and the unsustainable tools of growth, the more likely a disaster results when mother nature or human error throws us a curve ball and these tools let us down.

The volcano event has shown how dependent most of us are, mainly indirectly, on scheduled air services. When they’re interrupted for days or weeks, products cannot get to market, people get stranded, people run out of funds to live, business contracts are threatened or breached. And the thing is …. we can’t do anything about it. Good old Mother Nature reminds us that she’s in charge. No amount of management skill, market-driven competition, economic growth or new technology has any real effect.

I’m not saying that good public management skills, sound trading markets or new technologies are poor goals. I’m just saying that we all need a level of self-sufficiency in our places of living, our communities, and our lives such that our existence is not threatened by distant acts of nature. Disrupted, maybe; but not seriously threatened. Making us ever more dependent on remote technologies and activities is just not the way to go.

(I wrote about this in this article on the Haiti earthquake.)

And then we come to the oil rig situation – an even more salutary event with far longer-term implications and an even more obvious lesson for us. Here I’m going to borrow ideas and a few sentences from an opinion article I read in the Christchurch Press (May 3), written by The Times’s Simon Barnes. It was his piece that prompted me to think: I should be writing in the same vein, because I sure think the same.

As we watch on TV the desperation of the Americans who live and earn their livelihood by the coastline that will now inevitably be ruined for decades by the incoming oil slick, it is impossible to see any good side to this. There is no grey area, no “Yes, but ….”, and certainly no bright side. We’ve got it wrong, and we’re going to pay for it.

Those Americans whose jobs will be ruined by the destruction of the seafood stocks will be directly affected. The rest of us will be affected by the resulting costs and how they ripple through our economies.

And although the operator/owner of the exploded oil rig, BP, and its technology suppliers are directly to blame, we’re all indirectly responsible. Everyone who whinges every time the price of petrol goes up, and who demands the right to use a petrol-powered vehicle to go wherever they please, has played a part in this and every costly mistake made within the petroleum industry (including the tanker whose short-cut caused damage to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef last month). The oil suppliers are merely responding to demands from addicted consumers for petrol at the cheapest possible cost – which inevitably means ‘cut corners if you have to, I want my petrol now!’

As Simon Barnes put it: “These spills concentrate the mind, at least for a while. They tell us that our addiction for oil is madness, that our short-term thinking is madness, that our reckless approach to containment – oil at any price – is madness. Treasure this spill; it is a rare occasion on which we can see this essential truth of the way we run our lives with absolute clarity.

“We crave oil like a junkie craves his fix, and like the junkie, we will put up with anything to get it. But even for an addict, there come moments of searing clarity. A sudden revelation that this is actually a stupid way to live life. Well, the spill tells us that this is a stupid way to run our planet.”

Sorry for copying that bit, Simon. But it’s exactly what I’ve thought about the attitude of too many people who lack any longer-term respect for our environment, and he’s said it in far better words than I could have used.

And so I say, with feeling, “I also told you so!”