WE’RE DROWNING

At times it’s excruciatingly embarrassing living in New Zealand. Our sense of irrelevance, justifiable with our small population and geographic isolation, leads to an embarrassing self-consciousness and copycatism by our half-wit classes.

When no-hopers, ironically described as “activists,” lay on the streets of New York claiming to represent the 99% or whatever, (where incidentally, they were totally ignored) it was a gilt-edge guarantee our copy-cat attention-seekers would emerge to do the same, suitably placarded and rightly ignored.

When the “Me Too” Movement began in America, the predictable same old unimaginative copy-cats broke into song here.

When an unworldly Swedish girl with all the answers idiotically became a cause celebre world-wide, out came thousands of our school-kids to mindlessly march through our cities.

When an explosion of rioting across America broke out this week, following the blatant police murdering of a black man, our wets duly turned out to march, as if it made an iota of difference. And so came the tiresomely tedious haka, a fat girl embarrassingly weeping outside the Beehive and much more feigned attention-seeking distress.

I can tell you the cause of their next public marches and trust me, they’ll be regular events. That will be the unemployment marches and while they’ll make not an iota of difference, they’ll at least be justifiable rather than fashion-following.

Note this. On the day the grotesque murder by the psychopathic cop occurred the Economist co-incidentally ran a story on whatever happened to the “Black Lives Matter” cause in America.

The publication didn’t make this up as a story, rather it emanated from the founders of the movement who offered speculative reasons why it had run out of steam, despite the continuing pattern of police brutality against blacks.

In my view this abrupt nationwide outbreak of rage, lay in economics. Specifically, the mass unemployment resulting from the lockdown. Worldwide this measure, now being openly challenged as to its wisdom, has hit the poor particularly hard, particularly in America.

New Zealand is no exception. It’s been reported that 80% of families are suffering various degrees of financial strain. It ain’t going to get better, thanks entirely to abysmal political failure of true leadership.

But in America, a much tougher society with a pervading survival of the fittest creed, it’s been devastating for blacks who have had a virus-induced fatality rate four times that of whites, have a significantly higher unemployment rate, are conspicuous for their obesity, this a 50% factor in the virus death rate in the USA and Britain, and if employed, dominate the low paid unskilled categories.

The abominable slow murder of George Floyd was simply the trigger which set off an existing seething volcano of rage and frustration and as is the way of such events, quickly became contagious.

But did our wets have to marshal in pointless support? This was mindless attention-seeking, nothing else. Even God thought so as he temporarily suspended the extraordinary Indian summer we’ve been enjoying and made sure the skies were opened for the day and they were drenched. Doubtless he meant well but if he’d paid more attention instead of larking about with angels or whatever he gets up to, he’d have seen the pointlessness of this response, namely those show pony look-at-me marchers were already drowningly saturated.