Inequality is reflected in being a victim of crime too.

I am on jury duty this week - and it has got me reflecting that inequality is not just about income and property - it is also about your likelihood of being the victim of crime.
I didn't get picked today, but I did get through the first ballot.  It was my first time inside a courtroom and my first time inside the court building with all its security.  I found it a foreign space.  It is a place of extremes: well dressed, well educated and well paid judges and court staff, and many less well dressed, mostly less well paid and probably less well educated people who are clearly "in the system".

I ended up in a courtroom where a couple were being tried for rape and unlawful sexual connection amongst a range of similar charges.  I can make no judgement on this case, but I was reminded of a conversation I had in 2009 with a woman working for Corrections  who had been involved with this piece of research looking at who the victims of crimes are.  It turns out that there are enormous inequalities in our likelihood of becoming victims.

Most people (64%) experience no crime ever, while a mere six percent of people experience 54% of crimes. Some victims experience crimes against them time after time after time.  I remember going to a play at Christchurch Women's Prison where the women told there stories and I have to say that they were harrowing.  Every single one of the women in the play had also been victims of appalling crimes of violence over and over and over again.

The research also found that those most likely to experience crime were younger, from Mäori or ‘other’ ethnic groups, unmarried, more economically vulnerable, living in rented accommodation, in more economically deprived areas, in sole parent households or households comprised of flatmates or ‘other’ family combinations, in metropolitan cities (excluding Auckland), and in the upper half of the North Island.

In other words, these are people with few resources - financial, educational or social - which might allow them to escape the experience of ongoing crime.   And at the time the government cynically covered the release of this report by releasing some other document at the same time so that the media nevery picked this up.   Of course our government's refusal to spend money on poverty or address housing needs or even to feed hungry kids in decile 1 and 2 schools all serve nicely to maintain the status quo or even make it worse.

And I tell you what - my observations today really tell me that it really would be cheaper to spend the money helping kids in poverty, ensuring they have access to good schooling and to decent living conditions rather than spending it on the punitive police car at the bottom of the cliff. 

Is busyness closing us down to life?

I was intrigued the other day to read that the word “busy” written in Chinese uses the characters killing and heart.  This really made me sit up and stop, because it connected with something that I’ve been grappling with for some time. 

Back in the early 1990s, I remember writing about a phenomenon that some researchers were calling time deepening.  As part of my Masters research, I interviewed mountain bikers who told me that mountain biking was a concentrated, intense experience that meant a day could feel like a weekend away and it allowed them to spend the other day of their weekend doing something else.  Some bikers connected this with consuming more stuff (bikes, kayaks, gear of various types, for example). 

This is a first world problem!  People with good incomes most often talk about time being their limiting factor, rather than money.  Over the last 20 years, this problem has worsened, and it seems to me that we mindlessly run to consume more experiences and stuff and to earn the money that we ostensibly need to do these things.  Worse still, the amazing array of opportunities that we have doesn’t make us happy – rather we feel that we are missing out on the things that we don’t have time for.  Furthermore, we have stopped noticing the wonders of our life – we no longer have time to take in the view or smell the flowers or soak up the pleasure of being with our friends or in nature.

The Chinese had something.  Busyness really is killing our hearts – closing us down and making us less able to deal with both the pleasure and the pain that life throws our way. 

My path in recent years has been one of trying to slow down and do and consume less and most recently I’ve been working on being happier.  I’m amazed at how easy it is to be happy and mostly, I find that that means finding space to tend to the heart that I had been squeezing out of existence. 

I am happier, I earn a lot less money than I did, and because of that there are some things that I cannot do.  However I can enjoy the everyday, the amazing array of sights, sounds and experiences that are always available and enjoyable.  I find I don’t need a great deal to be happy and I have time for the things that matter.

The caveat for all this pleasure is that in some ways, I’m also sadder.  To be happy my heart has to be open and spacious, but an open and spacious heart notices the sadness too.  I find that I really care that we are destroying the beautiful planet that supports this wondrous thing called life.  I care for all the people out there rushing from pillar to post trying to fit more and more into their lives and feeling stressed and unhappy.  I care about those living in poverty when there is really no need for it to be this way,  and I fear for the gorgeous children that I know who are born into a world that seems to be rushing headlong into a very difficult future – a future made more difficult because so many have shut down their hearts  and don’t want to feel the pain of what is happening. 

Still, I find I’m prepared to feel sad because being with that sadness is the only way that I know what needs to be changed and it is the only way I know to really be open to the pure joy that there is in life too.

Happy new year .... may we all have a good future.

Well happy new year.
Ah, yes that time of year ... where we all wish each other a great year ahead!

While I generally am feeling quite positive, I find myself noting with some sense of irony that here we are wishing each other better and better new years whilst going about our lives in ways that pretty much ensure life is going to get tougher for us all.  We are definitely not wishing our kids a happy future!

Like many people, this summer, I got into my car and drove a few hundred kilometres using up fossil fuels and putting more carbon into our atmosphere. Travel is one of the biggest part of western carbon footprints as you can see from this breakdown of US carbon consumption. I note also that New Zealand's emissions per person were one of the highest in the world according to the Ministry for the Environment.

In the meantime, over the same period, news pours in from weather pundits about how things have been over the last year.  One of the hottest on record in Australia and in the USA and other places in the northern hemisphere, we hear that things have been rather more cold than usual because the polar vortex is changing  as a result of climate change.  High force hurricanes like Typhoon Haiyan continue and that across the world, 2013 was one of the hottest on record.  A report has been released about my home town (Christchurch) highlighting which parts of our city will go under water as sea levels continue to rise (and of course given sea level rise the City will also become much more prone to flooding which already happens periodically).  Not only that, it is clear that the oceans will be affected by acidification, changes to currents and by heating up (which is one of the reasons why hurricanes are becoming more forceful).

So my holiday and the holidays of many who travelled around the country or across the world have continued to contribute to the changes in our climate, which are already wreaking havoc across the world.  AND this is really only the beginning.

The arguments that NZ can do little to cut carbon emissions are clearly untrue, particularly on an individual basis.  There ARE things that we as individuals can do.  I was intrigued by this TED talk that highlights some work which shows that changing people's behaviour in ways that are not difficult can really make a difference to our carbon footprint and to things like the need for new power stations.  In 2009 I spent some time looking at my energy consumption and found it was quite easy to minimise with a bit of attention.

These days I use about 4-5 kw-hrs (or $NZ1.25) per day for all my cooking, water heating, and computing (and I work at home).  This drops a little in the winter when I use about a cubic metre of wood to heat my house and do some cooking/ water heating.  I used about 500 l of petrol which is about 35 litres about 14 times over the year. This amounts to $3.05 per day. This included all my business trips away and car running around town (I do most of my running around town on my bike).  I'm probably pretty inefficient as someone who lives alone rather than with other people.  Families and couples can almost certainly do a lot better per capita than this.

Food is the next thing to look at in terms of food miles, water consumption, fuel and methane emissions used to produce and transport it. This is a biggy and even more complex.  Watch this space!  

So I wish you a happy new year and hope that we might all wish the next generation the same thing - enough to take some individual action to lessen our energy consumption now.  It's no use waiting for our government to do anything  ...and why would they?  There is little to show them that anyone really cares.