An orgy of shopping, eating and family feuds
trumpeted.
For years I’ve asked widely and publicly for an example of such a highway (anywhere) easing congestion, and nobody has offered one. Not supporters like the AA (who, as the Irish joke goes, don’t seem to know why they believe something but are still willing to fight for it), and certainly not the dozen transport specialists I’ve asked around the world, who mostly laugh at the notion.
If we’re serious about fixing congestion, let’s learn from cities everywhere that, whatever else we do, we must still reduce lowoccupancy cars and enhance public transport.
And if it’s not really about congestion, let’s tell the NZTA they got that wrong, and we really want a Nelson bypass, or a scenic route, or whatever.
The Southern Link might be a red herring, but that shouldn’t cause Labour to listen to Matthews and build it regardless. inquiry] will be looking at the current approach to mental health and how to achieve best results’’.
I applaud this – it is indeed the current approach which is causing all our problems. Put in a nutshell: For 50 years we have followed the so-called recovery model in treating functional mental illnesses.
The 1992 Act was written deliberately with this ideological philosophy in mind. But this philosophy is only valid with mental illnesses from which one may recover. It is plain silly, and also terribly cruel, to use that model for chronic, incurable illnesses. We intuitively know this in the cases of organic illnesses; nobody, of course, would treat a senile person that way.
Broadly speaking, among the functional illnesses only the schizophrenias are chronic conditions. Our present problem would be solved overnight if we revert to treating schizophrenia the way it used to be treated, namely without ever expecting a cure – or even an improvement.
Realistic treatment of schizophrenic sufferers is ideally like the treatment we offer patients in our hospices : just comfort and compassionate understanding. The annual dose of Western mental opium is over, and another year is too soon to buy into the madness again. Can we make this biennial? Every five years, even?
The Chinese Communist Party in Henyang has called for a boycott of Christmas, arguing that Chinese customs should come first.
But what Chinese custom can equate with our frantic shopping followed by serious eating?
I doubt that the Christian aspect of the season is its chief appeal, if that’s what they’re afraid of, any more than it is here, where apart from recent immigrants, most of us have given up on religion and are almost as atheist as the Chinese.
We removed God from Parliament’s prayer this year as proof of our lack of belief in anything more powerful than ourselves, replacing him with crank diets and airy claims of Buddhism and spirituality, which may link with astrology for all I know. The main thing is, you don’t have to go to church. It may be a novelty to Christian converts in China, but not to us.
In declaring Christmas to be Western mental opium, the Henyang people – and Karl Marx – are and were completely mistaken. Opium, I gather, was a pleasant, dreamy experience, and Christmas is never that.
We should start calling it Family Day. That’s closer to the mark, with all the unrelaxing idea of family annoyances it entails.
You have to reach back a long way to believe Christmas is a totally happy event. I was probably about four. There were lollies, my uncle’s Wairarapa College sock filled with small toys, and an orange at the very bottom of that schoolboy Christmas stocking.
My grandmother was in charge of this gift from Santa. The orange belonged in her childhood, really, when Star Wars and Lego didn’t yet exist.
Like all wise children I believed in Father Christmas, obviously the star of the show, and didn’t yet notice that the gift-wrapping papers were carefully folded and recycled year after year, gradually becoming as soft as tissue paper. But time changes everything.
It makes you aware of undercurrents in your family that end in sudden shouting and sulking, old jealousies reignited and ancient wars revisited.
That’s the trouble with bringing back together people who’ve moved away, have changed, and maybe never liked each other in the first place. Yet there is a feeling of obligation that draws people together at this time of year in the hope that this time it will be all Disney, with wise words from the elderly, and the icky cuteness of small children, a rare outpouring of affection from parents who never praised you, and the inevitable babies vomiting down their mothers’ frocks.
A key element of Christmas celebrations in many families is the feud, revitalised annually.
Rather than respecting old people, it’s an opportunity to remind them of their shortcomings. Parents have plenty of those, because they never get child-rearing right, while their adult children feel blameless and hard done by. This is not the Holy Family we were once invited to adore. Being holy, they would have better manners.
It won’t be long before the planning of next Christmas begins, maybe next week. Women are in charge of this, it brings out their bossiness. I blame the women’s magazines they devour, full of celebrities in silly Santa hats offering revolting holiday recipes, along with confessions about their weight/marriage/latest illness/ pregnancies, and my personal favourite, ‘‘baby joy’’.
No celebrity experiences anything other than joy as they procreate, which of course is the whole deal about the birth of Jesus we have just celebrated in some vague way to do with singing carols.
Like many children, he had a hard time of it, let alone the many baby boys who were killed on Herod’s orders in an attempt to eradicate the expected saviour – Jesus, read the book – in his infancy, before he caused trouble. Which of course he did.
We’ll be remembering that at Easter, the festival of chocolate eggs and shooting bunnies in Central Otago that was once a religious observance too.
Maybe the Chinese communists are right. Mental opium could explain our collective confusion.