We can’t afford to be lazy about our values
Iwent to my first protest this week. It’s strange to admit that, by 25, I haven’t actually been to a protest yet. It was another rite of passage that I’d failed to do, along with a yardie, getting a skanky tattoo or flinging soft-serve into someone’s eyes during a midnight fight at Macca’s.
Yet there I was for the first time this Tuesday, at the National Day of Action in Auckland, a protest to keep the pressure on the Government to pass the amendments to the abortion law currently going through Parliament. It was a beautiful, sticky evening, and sweat was already cascading down the small of my back like a burst water pipe. It was that kind of relentless heat that makes you instantly restless and angsty – perfect for a protest.
I started the night aloofly sipping coffee on the sidelines – my natural position when I’m in unfamiliar situations. But by the end of it I was hugging people, yelling enthusiastically and coated in the gummy sweat of me and a hundred strangers.
And as I looked around at the crowds, from students in neat floral dresses to indie kids with violently pink hair to supportive boyfriends to mums with tutu-clad toddlers, I felt something hot and exciting pulsing in my stomach. This was real democracy. Not Twitter wars, media bitching or cross-party sniping. But the living, breathing, sweating, fighting, glitter-painted-face of democracy. God, it was great.
It hit me that I’d never have been here 12 months ago, even though I’ve long objected to our archaic and ridiculous abortion laws. (How is it still in the Crimes Act to have an abortion?!)
See, for a long time I felt the same way about protests as I do about Adele concerts, aka terrified. The idea of gathering with a large number of people to publicly express collective emotion fills me with the horror usually reserved for apocalypses, lentils and skydiving.
Plus, I just can’t stand earnestness. It brings out my contrarian side and makes me the sort of person who stands to one side scrolling through their phone in a superior manner.
So what changed? What got me into this sublime, sweaty, shouty scene? Well, if you’re anything like me, you’ll have had the disconcerting sensation for a while now that we’re living in increasingly weird times. Australia’s on fire, our phones are eavesdropping on our pillow talk, and the leader of the ‘‘free world’’ is a Cheeto with an obsessive compulsion for lying.
Obviously Trump doesn’t run New Zealand, and we thankfully have a (relatively) healthy democracy. But it’s also becoming obvious from Trump, Brexit, and even Australia’s leadership, that countries that were previous posterboys for all that was tolerant, liberal and fair-minded in democracy are increasingly falling to populism.
We’re not immune to those forces. Five minutes of reading on Facebook will tell you how much that sinister, omnipresent digital octopus is helping this happen. Suddenly it feels as though all those quaint little notions we took for granted, like the truth, balanced rationality and democracy as a whole, are under threat. And that has definitely put a fire under me to get out there and involve myself more in real-life democracy, of which protesting is a big part.
But also, there’s the question of what have the balanced, rational, liberal people of the West like me actually done to fight off the erosion of our values? Not much really, except write some excellent Trump jokes.
We’re complacent. I’ve always taken for granted that I’ll have liberal freedoms enshrined in law, like access to a safe abortion, because it’s the trap liberals always fall into. Sure, there may be issues, but underneath it all we all assume that we’re on a generally increasing, improving journey towards overall wokeness. That’s why I haven’t ever really protested; I’ve been too comfortable.
But you only have to look at the increasingly sustained attacks on Roe v Wade to know how dangerously wrong that mindset is. We’re absolutely not on an exponential curve to enlightenment. Rights can be won and lost again.
What’s worse is, while we’ve been chillaxing, others have been twisting our liberal attitudes to look like the ideology of uncaring elites.
It’s even more dangerous to be complacent about women’s rights. I can hear my mum’s sonorous voice intoning as I write this, ‘‘Verity, your grandmother, and her mother and her mother and her mother . . .’’ (we come from a long line of proud battle-axes) ‘‘did not fight for women’s rights only for you to get lazy about it now!’’
She’s right, as always. We can’t afford to be lazy. We need to be active – protesting, challenging, supporting and embracing the systems of public representation we’ve taken for granted. Because if we don’t use it, there’s a very real possibility we’ll lose it.