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. 

What makes an inspiring story?

I went to a resilience workshop yesterday and think I was supposed to come away feeling all inspired.  To the same end, I watch TED talks and go to quite a few workshops and goodness knows, I've even run workshops that are focused on creating social change.


However, the more I listen or watch, the more I'm starting to get get depressed and feel pretty inadequate, hearing all these inspiring stories of resilience and community and super human people doing amazing things with no difficulty at all!  I find myself wondering if I'm the only person to have found building social change so hard.

My experiences working to build up a greater sense of community in my part of the world seem to involve a lot of work and need a great deal of patience.  Not only that, they very often involve personal risk, frustration, negotiation, disappointment and grind - things that really are difficult and that wear me down.  Given that so many others find it easy (apparently) should I give up now and go and do something that would be a bit more rewarding?  What am I doing wrong, I find myself asking.

I've been watching a few videos on storytelling and I"m starting to realise that these sweetness and light stories aren't really even good stories!  The structure of a good story involves having a hook, a hold and a payoff.  The hook in my world is the desire to see things changing/ happening/ building.  The hold is the bit that shows some struggle and that mean the outcome is uncertain - situations that help the story recipient feel how the main character really wanted to give up but they kept going through thick and thin in the face of all that and finally achieved what they set out to do or not (the payoff (which might also be a loss).

So now I'm really starting to want some stories that don't just tell me about the finished, shiny new result - I want to them to show the difficulties that people faced and how they got through them. If it was all easy then frankly it is quite a boring story and I guess the inspiration is in the idea of what has been done or the idea rather than in the process of doing it.

It would make for a much more engaging story if it has some of the hard stuff in it too - so I guess that might be my mission - composing a story that does involve struggle and does inspire through the achievement of the vision even though it was hard.  I still wonder though - are I and the people I talk with day to day the only ones who finds making change difficult?

All those people and all that work behind Rosa Parks...

Rosa Parks

I love this article.   It's about Rosa Parks - the woman who apparently tipped the fortunes of the American Civil Rights movement by refusing to give up her seat on the bus. Or rather, it's NOT about her so much as it is about  the many many poeple who had been, and were, working really hard in the civil rights movement at the time.  Without them, Rosa Parks would probably never had done what she did.  And if she had, nothing would have happened as a result of it. 

Understanding that helps to give me hope because frankly a lot of activism is pretty unrewarding and tiring.You do things and nothing happens or perhaps, very little happens.  Many give up and decide they've done their dash, perhaps because they've burnt out or got sick or become too cynical.

It helps me enormously to know that every little bit does actually count and that we can't all be Rosa Parks.  Most of us will be the nameless people in the background who set the situation up.  In Parks' case, there were those who convinced her to join the cause, trained her up, worked with white communities to sow seeds that sprouted and grew strong when Parks did her thing. There were the groups who raised money for the cause, the lawyers who moved in to defend Rosa and so on.  There were countless hours, months and years of activism going on before the change happened.  Who knew when or how or even if the change would happen, but  those involved kept on trying to change things because they simply believed that it was the right thing to do and that it needed doing.

So, while it seems that we (ie all human beings on this planet) keep on walking into an environmental crisis of rather alarming proportions, it is also clear that we have to keep working with hope.  No matter what we do to help raise awareness or make a difference - even in very small ways - it is helping change the system so that one day an environmental Rosa Parks incident might just create the change we are working for.

I only hope that this happens soon (although I have to accept that perhaps it won't).  In the meantime though I'm just going to take whatever (small and insignificant) steps I can in the knowledge that it all counts!  It's important to do it even when it seems hopeless - just as the civil rights cause must have felt back in Rosa Parks' time.

Organised activisim is more effective!

I've just been talking with some people about being an activist, and I realised as I did that that perhaps my take home message is it pays dividends to be organised when you are an activist - at least the kind of activist taking part in political processes. 

What every political activist needs!

I reflected a bit on this in a previous post, but realise now that there is a bit more to it. 
As I've mentioned it is good to get many submissions into something that you want to see change.  This has worked for cycling advocates at local government level in Christchurch, However it has made no difference whatsoever at national government level over the last couple of years, whether that be around the GCSB bill, the Government Policy Statement on Transport or changes to the RMA and even things associated with CERA.

Timing probably also matters:  Possibly the government will be more tractable next year when they are facing an election (although I"m also sure that they won't put up anything contentious as they have in years 1 and 2 of this election cycle).  Likewise, getting the CCC to change its mind may be easier in an election year, if you can prove that a lot of people feel this way, for example!

There is also the small problem of the enormous amount of work that has to go into a submission, particularly if you have to do the whole thing yourself - read the appropriate documents (and often to write an effective submission it is helpful to know quite a lot of background (like how transport planning works in the case of supporting cycling or walking), think about the implications and then gather evidence to support your comments.  Being linked to a group of people with similar interests can help to spread the load and can also mean you can collect lots of ideas to support your viewpoint and indeed the ideas might help you form your viewpoint. 

Of course, those of us who are activists also know that there is way more that we could be doing but of course we simply can't do it.  I often see a call for me to write submission on topics that I do care about and I know matter, but I have to just think "hopefully someone else out there is looking out for that because right now I just can't."   In this latter case, if I do have a bit of time and I have access to some background information, then I might put something together in my own words or send in something to say I support that submission. But I won't if that information is not there because I simply don't have time.   So this says something about how useful I find it being networked with people who have different interests and who can keep me up with the play on what his happening.

These days, social media and the internet can help with this kind of organisation, although it is also clear that these need to be treated with an awareness that they may not be entirely private!

This is not the time to get depressed and give up!

I read this, this morning and couldn't actually read it right through (and I"m not recommending you attempt it either.  You can the gist by looking at it very quickly.  The unashamed stupidity of the world amazed, me ... in a bad way.

The trouble is that increasingly I'm aware that all this scary information doesn't change things. .. on its own, that is. Also,  pretty much anyone reading this blog is likely to be aware of the environmental issues facing us and  this post and this post, outline something of how the social structures that we live in help keep it that way.

Sometimes when I look at all this, I'm sad.  I've had quite a few conversations with other people who are also sad and scared about what they see happening.  I find that many of us are feeling lost and little, and paralysed by the enormity of the issues, and it's a heavy burden to carry.  But at the same time, our environmental crisis is NOT and never will be a spectator sport, as this interesting website puts it and our unpleasant feelings actually won't go away if we just do nothing. In short, they are not a reason to avoid engaging with the issues as they unfold or avoiding doing something to   It is not going to help anyone (even ourselves) to keep burying our head in the sand and hoping that the crisis will pass if we stop looking at it. It won't! 

For me at the moment there is hope at the end of this talk by Jared Diamond and in this talk by Johan Rockstom.  As Diamond puts it, just about ANYTHING that we take action on could make a difference in the long term and might help 'bend the lines' as Rockstrom puts it.

It's is also good to recognise that sadness arises because the world is actually also a source of joy and love, as well as worry and fear.  Recognising the joy and love, and the goodness in people is a good reason for looking the issues directly in the eye and to keep trying to make a difference.

These things can give meaning to the actions that we choose to take whether that is leaving the car at home wherever possible, minimising our consumption, learning how to garden,  helping out a neighbour, finding ways to build and join collective actions working to improve the cohesion and resilience of our communities or helping people understand the power of collective action - whatever that action might be, life is not a spectator sport, and right now, this is life in the early 21st century.  Go for it and learn how to enjoy the action.