Dangers aplenty in town and in the country
Iam feeling almost nostalgic for the vile old blowflies you used to stumble across in the country wherever there was something rotting, which there always was, or fresh manure – there was a ton of that – to feast on. It had ugly habits and was a beast of a thing, persistent and squelchily repulsive, but it had its place among the general stink underfoot that is country life.
I may be a farmer’s daughter but I thank the universe for endless hot water and central heating, as well as the general lack of animal poo in my life – unless you count our two cats, who’ve taken lazily to the dirtbox since we moved house, wrongly believing they’ve come to a four-star animal hotel.
No blowflies will ever haunt their excrement because there are no more blowflies, and no more other insects that I used to take for granted, says scientist Bob Brockie. Like him I remember walking on the edge of the country town I lived in at dusk and entering clouds of what we called midges, but could have been the mayflies he says have also vanished.
Once I lay still in the long grass at the end of our street, on my walk home from school, and saw little pink and blue moths fluttering around me. I hope they’re still out there, but it’s always possible that DDT dealt to them, as it has to many other living things.
Our farming practices, including past copious use of DDT, do not endear farmers to me, bearing in mind that my own family was no better than most, and quite possibly worse, though in their defence they were hardly industrious. Today the river that ran through that family farm, the Ruamahanga, is poisonous to dogs by the time it reaches the south Wairarapa.
I remember playing in its clear water, but today a dog can be dead within half-an-hour if it eats a piece of its toxic algae the size of a 50 cent coin. The plant species growing in that stretch of river, phormidium, produces a poison as deadly as cobra venom. You’d be mad to swim among it.
Whether or not we can blame farming for this problem, and we probably can’t, there is concern for the state of our rivers now that farming has become increasingly impersonal and industrialised. The kids who marched on Parliament last week demanding that all rivers be swimmable weren’t asking for the moon, but what their parents and grandparents used to take for granted. If we’re clean and green let’s act like we believe it.
Another kind of harm has been highlighted by teenage sexual activity at Opotiki College, which last week resulted in a discharge without conviction for five teenage boys prosecuted for sex with underage girls. Behaviour, with the environment, changes and is challenged, and the same goes for the sexual activity of girls in a world where pornography is a click of a mouse away, advertising is sexualised, and families like the bizarre Kardashians set new norms in body image as if the body is all that matters.
Last weekend I watched two girls of about 14, around the age of the girls involved in the Opotiki case, walking through town dressed like fashion models in magazines that target their age group. You try not to stare when a young girl’s buttocks are hanging well below her skimpy shorts; she doesn’t realise there’s a difference between the pages of magazines and the real world for the very good reason that she’s too young.
The trial of the older boys involved reportedly tore the town apart, and on balance the town’s adults seem to feel the boys’ acquittal was the common sense outcome. I’m not entirely sure.
Here I’m thinking of local councillor Barry Howe, who said ‘‘It sounded really bad when the police publicised it. But once it got to the nitty-gritty, people realised that it’s a load of bullshit.’’ It’s not bullshit. A court may not be the ideal place to sort out such situations, but it reminds everyone there is a legal age of consent for a reason. At issue here is the protection of children, who are children even when they have breasts and menstruate. They cannot consent to sex because they are children, end of story, and when we start making excuses for what the councillor called the nittygritty, adult responsibility has left the building.