Notes from the Panopticon

The Lives of others

I always prefer to believe the best of everybody, it saves so much trouble.  ~ Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936)

I have just returned from New Zealand. It was the third of what I hope will be many, many visits.

New Zealand is special. Its beauty is not just skin deep. Granted it has spectacular landscapes and wilderness and emptiness and quiet roads where the curves slow you right down, but the best of it is an attitude to life that has vanished in much of the world. Let me illustrate.

Massive melon 

We went to stay with New Zealanders whom we had never met. My wife had started an e-mail acquaintance while researching a family from which our soon-to-be new friends were descended and this resulted in an invitation to stay for two nights.

The second night, I helped prepare supper. We were having water melon for dessert. It was so enormous that our hostess called a neighbor, cut the melon in half and gave half to him. Was it going to be too much for him? If so, he should give half to the people at the next farm. And then it turned out that the melon had been given to us by yet another person who had grown it. A gift shared out and passed on three times.

Once you start to notice such examples, the generosity, kindness and caring go on.

Working lunch 

We stayed in a motel and on arrival in the evening we asked the receptionist to help us book a trip the next day into the bush (NZ for the country). We were told to bring a packed lunch. The receptionist gave us directions to the best food shop for the morning but, when we got up, there was a bag with two packed lunches hanging on the door handle. There was also a note: "I was making these for a group of road contractors who are staying. It was no trouble to make two more."

She'll be right 

One of the reasons my wife made the trip was to visit various libraries across the country. This involved trawling through miles of microfilm and dozens of files of documents going back to the mid-nineteenth century. And loads of photocopies. Each evening, she told the staff how many copies she had made. "Don't worry, we'll take payment when you've finished." The days passed and the potential bill mounted. If she had left the country without paying, it would have been difficult to recover the money. Yet they trusted her. A Kiwi saying covers it all: "She'll be right."

Traumatized hijacker 

New Zealand is a country which lacks paranoia and it feels much healthier for it. While we were there, a mentally-disturbed Somali woman tried to hijack a plane. Helen Clark, the Prime Minister, responded maturely. She told an aggressive (and potentially racist) interviewer that it was wrong to tar a community with the brush of an individual who had lost control. She pointed out that much of the Somali community had been deeply traumatised before they has fled a war-torn country and found refuge in New Zealand. She said that much should be done to support people who had suffered. What a refreshing change from the heartless attitude which characterises much of the vocal response to refugees who find their way to the UK.

Clark also pointed out that this was an isolated incident. Over-reaction by insisting on elaborate security measures would overburden a country that relies on frequent small-scale domestic flights, often from tiny airports and on small aircraft. She was waiting for reports to decide in detail what to do, but it was clear that she preferred to look at the thousands of flights that passed without incident rather than at the one which had gone wrong.

Defeating paranoia 

Many years ago, I suffered the indignity of being stabbed in the back by a work colleague whom I trusted. It was horrible. But what was far worse was the way in which my attitude to people changed. Until that point, I had lived my life assuming the best of everyone I met and this made for a jolly and positive life. That feeling vanished overnight. Once I had recovered from the shock, I set about reorienting myself. I decided that not trusting other people was such a debilitating attitude that I myself was reduced by it. So over the months, I set about restoring my trust. It was not easy and it took much longer than I expected. But it was worth the effort and, happily, my feeling of well-being is now restored.

Being in a country where paranoia is not the natural state is so refreshing. Paranoia feeds on itself. Self-protective measures become more and more aggressive but they only aggravate the feeling that not enough is being done to achieve security. That feeling will never go away because complete safety is unachievable. The harder you try to eliminate danger, the more futile your search for security becomes.

Growing up 

What is true for the individual is also true for a state. But it takes maturity on the part of politicians charged with balancing freedom and security to admit this and to stop pretending that they can provide total security.

Later in our visit, I was struck by another example of how mature political debate can be in New Zealand. Auckland is the country's only big city. It does not have a proper mass transport system and therefore suffers from serious traffic congestion. Local politicians now propose to impose a tax surcharge on petrol in the city to pay for the provision of decent public transport and when interviewed, local voters recognised the need for this. They accepted it had to be done and that no-one but themselves should be asked to pay for it.

It is strange that politicians and voters in this young country are so mature, while those who work in our mother of parliaments are so prone to hysteria. Perhaps it has something to do with the British voting system. First past the post was used in New Zealand until it was changed in the face of growing popular disillusion with sleaze in public life. Perhaps abandoning the principle of winner-takes-all has injected fresh air into a stagnant political culture. More of that in a future article.

Picture credits:

ruudvisser.wordpress.com/.../17/watermelon-art/

http://notetoself-dickie.blogspot.com/2007_06_24_archive.html

The World’s Toughest Kiwi

"If it would not look too much like showing off, I would tell the reader where New Zealand is.": Mark Twain 1835-1910

Last time I visited New Zealand, the film "The World's Fastest Indian" had just been released. Based on a true story and celebrating of a real life eccentric, it starred Anthony Hopkins as Burt Munroe, an elderly Kiwi from Invercargill. He lived alone in a small community where everyone was very close. His reputation was mixed: admiration for his mechanical skills; distaste for his gardening practices (he used to pee on his lemon tree).

I had been told that, if I wanted to understand New Zealand, all the clues I needed were in that film. The main character had a passion for motorbikes; he owned an old Indian (a brand more famous in its day than Harley Davidson is now) and constantly tinkered with it. He used imagination, improvisation, and above all very little money, to tune it up so it went very fast. He learnt of the speed trials for motorbikes on the salt flats of Utah and determined to prove that his was the world's fastest Indian. But he had to do it all on a tiny budget.

His three problems were the flakiness of his machine, his lack of money to fix problems, and his small town background. He did not understand procedures, or rules, or safety regulations. He was accustomed to a world where people made things up as they went along and everyone had a chance.

The two qualities which made it possible for him to break the barriers were his innate charm and his naïve refusal to accept that what seemed to him the obvious solution to any problem might be against the rules. He also possessed an indefatigable ingenuity; he allowed nothing to get in his way.

This story captures a quality that continues to live on in New Zealand. A friend, a nurse, told me about a patient who arrived at her hospital with a serious cut across most of his head. He was 78.

An enthusiastic hiker, he had gone on a three day tramp, alone in the wilderness. His wife was due to pick him up at the end of his trip. So she was surprised to receive a call asking her to pick him up a day early. He had been crossing a river using stepping stones when one of the rocks came loose and rolled away, throwing him into the water. He gashed his head on a rock and the water was so deep he had to swim, but he still had the strength to throw his sodden pack onto the bank and climb out after it.

He mopped up the blood on his head and made a dressing for the wound by ripping up a T shirt. He set about gathering wood and making a fire, despite the fact that much of the wood was green. He painstakingly dried the content of his backpack over the fire, including his mobile phone, and then set off to climb a steep hill to find a mobile phone signal. From there, he telephoned his wife but he still had to walk tens of kilometers to reach the road.

It was his wife who told him how badly he had injured his head. But instead of going straight to the hospital, he insisted on going home to take a shower. His next port of call was the Department of Conservation, where he reported the danger of the loose boulder. Only then did he agree to go to hospital. And when he arrived in the emergency department, he asked for some sutures so he could stitch his own head.

Tough bunch the Kiwis.

Picture credits:

http://www.indianmotorbikes.com/features/munro/munro.htm

www.blacksheeptouring.co.nz/