Over the weekend, I zoomed in to speak in one tournament, judged another tournament, and ran a workshop. All in all, around 18 hours of debating. My brain is blasted. You are not getting more out of me than what I pre-wrote earlier last week, and the weekly export puzzle.
[Big warning that I’m talking about state abuse in care.]
I’m writing this having just seen the 1News summary of the state abuse in care report. What has been boiling away for decades, in plain sight for so many - and while the word “gaslighting” is outrageously overused these days, it’s entirely appropriate to say hundreds of thousands were gaslit on top of the abuse - the horror is finally, unavoidably visible to the country as a whole. If you’re up for it, you should absolutely read up on some of the reporting. Atrocious stuff from so many angles.
The Prime Minister said today he was sorry to those who suffered at Lake Alice. We have a start; we hope for something more than the decades of stalling and coverups, continued right up until John Key and Bill English and given only a half-hearted challenge by Ardern when she put together the inquiry then did nothing about it. If ever you need convincing that, even in what I firmly believe is one of the greatest countries in the world, that people can be enormously vulnerable through no fault of their own, that business as normal is not fine, that even our high-trust society of wonderful people must take seriously the idea that humans can be utterly horrible to each other and power structures get dangerous, this is it. Period.
The thousands and thousands of people who carried out this abuse prayed to God and spoke of good values and were generous and charitable. They hung out with their friends, they drank and laughed, they stayed late at work to help out somebody else and they looked out for their neighbours. They were, and are, ordinary Kiwis. And they chose, day in and day out, to inflict atrocious tortures on other ordinary Kiwis, leaving them with terrible trauma and leading many to take their own lives and many more into lives of crime and gangs. One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest again and again and again and again and again.
There's something incredulous enough about how governments have refused to take seriously the impact of abuse and trauma on future criminals, and yet more so on how the fact that anybody - even the elderly, the disabled, the pregnant, the children - could fall afoul of abusers through pure bad luck, that there was no security, is just as much of a crime as anything a gang does. Just state-sanctioned crime. Sometimes control and abuse from cradle to grave. There are around a thousand unmarked graves connected to a Sunnyside mental asylum in Christchurch alone. A thousand dead and vanished.
Particularly what amounts to the wholesale confinement of much of an entire race of people as Māori from iwi across the country were and are dragged into the belly of this horrible machine. I was reading a book of NZ history recently, and I think it's worth citing a stat to put this into context - in 1936, 11.6% of Māori lived in rural areas; in 1996, 86% of Māori did. Obviously this doesn’t owe to the constant seizure of Māori people, but what I mean by this is that people who, a century after Te Tiriti, still lived largely apart from the government’s institutions endured state abuse in care as the spearhead of colossal dislocation through the time period in which our country, in many ways, became more progressive, softer, gentler.
The draconian control of the empire, land seizure, and true patriarchy were all justified through condescending paternalism, that some humans know better than other humans what's best for them. So too was the old British colonial rule slowly replaced by a new, enlightened despotism that, even at the same time as we enjoyed some of the highest standards of living in the world and a progressive democracy, controlled and trashed the lives of so many survivors. Thousands more people participated in doing everything possible to push the life-defining pain of people off of their tables so they could focus on other business, business as normal. What could possibly be more important than this? State abuse in care proves New Zealand's fantasticness does not make us exceptional; proves that the fundamental evil of human nature lives everywhere humans do.
And, confusingly, it proves how reluctant people are to be heroes. Stopping this was as good a deed as anybody could hope to accomplish in their lives, and so many in positions of power passed up on the chance, turned a blind eye, treated abusers as colleagues and friends and employees rather than dangerous and twisted people. Even now, the report has serious flaws. Survivors must report to the very institutions who perpetrated abuse against them. The Catholic Church maintains its aura of invincibility well into the 21st century.
And, unbelievably, we are starting boot camps on the premise that “we don't know if they work, but there are problems in the world, so screw it, why not see if putting more children in care works better than our current failure?" It would be one thing if there were an evidential basis it could be done better, but it just isn’t. It’s flat lies when our government’s politicians say they are listening to and learning from survivors who, present in Parliament as they say it, call bullshit and demand no more camps when we know where they lead.
Instead, of all people, it is survivors, the most vulnerable, who have so often continued to elevate their voices despite their vulnerability and despite all the ways they were pushed down and silenced. I won't call them heroes - we don't need to find a new, smiley-faced way to suppress victims who speak out by turning the trauma they suffered into the engines of storybook stuff. Certainly, however long they have made it for, they have exhibited heroic traits in the courage to go on and the boldness to speak. There is no shame for those who could not speak out and nothing, no lack of sympathy for those who could not make it further one day and took their own lives, and no black-and-white view in store for those who themselves went on to do terrible things.
We should not hesitate to share our belief in the tenacity of anybody who needs to hear it. Some people find comfort in identifying trauma as a source of strength, others desperately want it to be heard that trauma just hurt them and made them weak. Everybody's experiences is their own and is real. But what this report and these advocacy groups demand is one thing above all else. It is not our detaching of them from ourselves as magically resilient people who were passively hurt by an amorphous, unidentifiable mass of the past.
It is our understanding of a simple truth denied to them for so much of their lives even as others of us have enjoyed it - we all share a common humanity. That you can make calls about your own life and that you’re safe and given basic dignity. Humans can't possibly deserve this. Symbolic apologies will mean a lot, but ultimately the test of if we understood - if all this pain could mean something - will be if we change the rules, rebuild our systems of control over other people's lives, so that this can't happen again, and so that, when, inevitably, somebody is horrible to another person, that person can seek and receive safety and justice promptly. We can never forget this as a society. We cannot let this continue. We can’t.
The country is Israel!
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