David Slack It’s not the end of the world
Our worries of cultural dilution are tiny in the grand scheme of the universe, writes David Slack.
It’s horrible to upset a child. The comedian Louis C.K. can show you how to do it. ‘‘Daddy, does the Earth go around the Sun?’’ his 7-year-old asked him one day. ‘‘Yes,’’ he told her. ‘‘And will the Earth always go around the Sun forever?’’ Well, no, he said, ‘‘at some point the Sun’s going to explode.’’
She burst into tears. He grabbed the nearest comforting words: ‘‘Oh, honey, this isn’t gonna happen until you and everybody you know has been dead for a very long time.’’
She didn’t know any of those things, he says, and now she knew all of them: ‘‘She’s gonna die. Everybody she knows is gonna die. They’re gonna be dead for a very long time, and then the Sun’s gonna explode.’’
I find it easier to process what Duncan Garner wrote this week when I put it in this context.
This is not to say I await the last of his columns, or mine. But nothing lasts forever.
What did Garner say, exactly? He wrote a column describing the experience of waiting in a long queue at Kmart. He described the queue by length and colour and ethnicity. Why was the queue long? Might it be because Kmart doesn’t put on enough staff? Maybe, but Garner wonders if we’re bursting at the seams. And maybe bursting at the seams with people who are Not Like Us.
Poor old Garner. It took me back to a letter to the editor at the time of Don Brash’s Orewa speech. ‘‘Today I waited in a queue at a Howick bank. There were five people ahead of me. Three were Asian, two were Indian, both the tellers were Asian and the manager sat in her office – an Asian. The sixth person in the queue was me – a third-generation (New Zealander) of English descent, with blue eyes and blond hair. Nobody was speaking English and I just wanted to cry. Today I felt like an alien in my own country.’’
Is this how we’re feeling, those of Us who are Like Us? A Facebook post this week by one of the country’s longest-serving journalists declared: ‘‘The only race not respected are European/Pakeha. No pride in such culture any more.’’
Duncan says he was making a point about New Zealand bursting at the seams, underinvesting in infrastructure and planning, but some readers inferred a xenophobic dimension. It’s unfortunate when a Canon columnist of the year has difficulty making himself clear. I just wonder if I hear a small plaintive cry in there as well, lamenting the vanishing of Our Way of Life. An alien in my own country, standing in a long brown snake to buy underpants.
When the ground shifts beneath you, even a little, it can be unsettling. Was that just a passing truck or are we sitting on a North Shore car park? Is everything I know about to vanish? Is my culture as I know it about to be swamped by immigrants?
How about: ‘‘not really’’. You may have your Uber driven by a dude from Pakistan, your dumplings made by a young woman from Shanghai, but take a look around. Rugby, fish and chips, meat pies, Speight’s, jandals and the smell of fresh cut grass at the park. Your culture hasn’t vanished, it’s just that you’re more or less oblivious to it. It’s the water, you’re the fish.
In any case, does a culture ever warrant being preserved forever? How much regret do we have about leaving behind the six o’clock swill, the unspoken domestic violence, the second-class status of women? And do we not see so much more work to be done?
Things change. They never stop changing. The most tragic thing you can do is imagine you can stop it. The world evolves, we adapt, and the long sweep of history carries humanity upward. Take heart, and put your fretting into the change that matters: an environment in dire climate change jeopardy, a world of artificial intelligence that is upending everything we thought we knew about making a living.
The length of the queue at Kmart could hardly matter less. Maybe one day it will have nobody in it Like Us. But probably not until everybody we know has been dead for a very long time.
How much regret do we have about leaving behind the six o'clock swill, the unspoken domestic violence, the secondclass status of women?