Socialism’s a worry but so is getting old
At the 1999 Rugby World Cup New Zealand stumbled to France in the semifinals. We grieved and our misery was compounded by Kevin Roberts, who took out a full-page ad telling us how we should feel about it.
For me, the loss was exacerbated because I was older than Robin Brooke, the oldest All Black in that squad.
At 33, my best years were already gone, and frankly, I hadn’t done very much with my life.
Less than a decade later we elected John Key.
At 47 he was young for the job but I was merely 42 so I wasn’t too disturbed by this development.
Eventually, though, I became older than Key had been when he was elected and still my achievements were so pitiful I struggled to fill out my LinkedIn profile, much less earn a Wikipedia entry.
I was pleased to see him hand power to someone suitably grey. The day I would be forced to live in a country run by someone younger than me had been postponed; hopefully to a point in time where my own life had some notable achievements to assuage my increasing sense of inadequacy.
Damn.
Living under the death grip of a newage socialist is far less of a concern to me than the fact that I have passed another milestone in my relentless march to a long dirt nap.
The new prime minister is younger than me. By well over a decade. And I’ve still done nothing to earn a tombstone larger than a cinderblock.
Thankfully, I can turn to our sovereign for solace.
Even though I may be forced to endure the tyranny of youth in our colonial government I take consolation that the sovereign was 50 when I came hollering into the world. Her son, bless him, has both the gift of age and given his titular role has no need of the wisdom he so clearly lacks.
So while the media (social and what passes for the mainstream) rejoices at the elevation of our antipodean Cinderella I am sitting in the corner, marinating in self-loathing and a crushing sense of personal inadequacy.
My only comfort, and it is trivial given the enormity of my own sense of insufficiency in the face of Jacinda Ardern’s premiership, is the deep knot of angst that must sit in Winston Peters’ heart.