Whanau are worth more than fishing
Even Santa has lungs, and frankly, comorbidities. I chatted last week to a friend about how this year, Santa would have to wear a mask. We were likely the last people to see him without PPE for a while. If his facial hair was a clip-on, she said, maybe he could wear his mask under his beard?
We crave the comfort and familiarity of Christmas but in 2021 this weakness could see Santa finally go down, tipped over the edge by summer heat, belly padding, and now PPE; a panting Shrek the sheep, moaning from the mall linoleum for a Powerade.
I think we need to mothball Santa, Christmas and the great Kiwi summer. Forget them for a year. They’re absurd. We have an unbendable expectation that our holidays and their tinsel accoutrements are as inevitable as summer itself. Pining for pre-pandemic ways could get someone killed.
The Government set a 90 per cent double-jab target for all district health boards before launching its traffic light system. Globally 90 per cent is a high target, but Ma¯ ori left in the dust in the vaccination drive did not get our own minimum threshold. Cabinet reviews progress on November 29, as we start the slide to Christmas. I hope it does not succumb to the pressure of warm memories of old summers.
I mean, let’s flash back to kid Joel, at home in Massey, Auckland, in the 1970s. The north-western motorway groused away over the back fence; a metal pylon was plonked in the neighbours’ yard, humming pleasantly. I used to think that pylon was a jungle gym big enough for God. The Big Guy himself was busy hitching up his walk shorts, uncorking a bottle of leaded petrol, radiation, and crab grass, and pouring it out on the neighbourhood.
Sure, we were environmentally polluted, but I loved Christmas. Kid me loved the long summer holidays, which defined yearly cycles I thought would roll on forever. The absolute permanence of death is something Generation X now grapples with in middle age. Some of us don’t care; some turn to marshmallow. I’m the marshmallow variety. I’m less worried by my old rosy memories. You see, my prematurely dead uncles, aunties, mother ... make me feel an ominous sense of dwindling whakapapa, of vanishing ma¯ tauranga.
Ma wai e pupuri te matauranga, te mohiotanga – nga taonga no nga tipuna i tuku iho – mehemea kua mate ka nga rangatira, nga tohunga, nga koroua, kuia?
Me tiaki ta tou, Ngai Maori, i te taura, e honohono mai ana te hunga ora i te hunga mate, ara , o tatou tipuna, o tatou whakapapa.
He aha tenei taura?
He tangata, he tangata, he tangata, e hoa ma.
[My words, in summary – who will care for our treasures when our best have died? We must protect the cord that binds us to our ancestors. That cord is people.]
National’s response to Covid-19 has been guttingly banal. It had an opportunity to offer innovation but instead would simply open our borders on December 1. As for ACT, on page 7 of its
Life after lockdown policy document, it has helpfully suggested loaning at-home Covid-19 patients blood oxygen monitors to self-triage to hospitals.
So it’s left to the Government to keep its nerve – to look past our unquestioned entitlement to the great Kiwi summer. To wait till Maori, and other vulnerable groups, at least match the rest of the population.
It comes down to a simple request – don’t potentially kill my whanau because we can’t bear losing a few days of fishing. Please. By cancelling Christmas – if only our sentimental attachment to it – we actually embrace the spirit of Christmas.
Nga¯ mihi, te Grinch.