The Solution

So seeing as how I'm in Tauranga now and my adventures are pretty much over, I thought I would write up a few of the ideas I've been cooking up to help stop myself from growing cold, calculated and conservative...

The first idea is something I decided on a few years ago. I was thinking about how predictable most people's lives are and how we are encouraged to follow certain paths and achieve certain things and therefore end up in fairly certain places. The "ideal" pathway for someone in my position seemed to be to finish school, get a degree, get a job, find a wife, buy a house, have kids, raise kids, plan for retirement, retire, die. This pathway is tempting, and in an ideal world I would love to be able to concern myself with nothing other than raising a healthy family, but the world is not perfect. It seems to me that by the time you have done a few of the things on that list you have so much invested in the system that you really can't afford to (and probably don't have the time or energy left to) work for meaningful change in society (especially the level of change I desire). I don't doubt that some people do manage to do it, but I think I will have a much better chance at affecting meaningful change if I avoid this conventional pathway.

When I started university I had the idea that I would become an engineer and be able to make heaps of money and therefore give heaps away and maybe even use my position as an engineer to help people here or in poorer countries increase their quality of life. Somewhere in the middle of my studying that idea fell over on top of me. This happened for a few reasons.

• I realised that while I would set about an engineering career with all the good intentions, good intentions would not guarantee me lots of money to give away to do the good I desired, especially when I would probably need a car and a house, and would probably end up with a wife and kids, etc. Whereas if instead of chasing after money to give to other people to do "good things" I simply did "good things" myself, there would be much less uncertainty involved and I would be pretty much guaranteed to have a positive impact.
  
• As I came to look at the pyramid scheme known as capitalism more critically and realise that as a professional engineer I would be quite close to the top of the pyramid, I began to question whether it would even be possible for me to give away enough money to make up for the harm I would be doing by participating so wholeheartedly in capitalism.
  
• Then there's the myth that progress is always good. The ways in which western society has chosen to progress have often and often continue to to be harmful and unsustainable. I'm not sure that going to other countries and teaching them how to do things like we do them is what they need or even want. And in any case if there are professional engineering jobs to be done overseas which can't be done by locals, I'm sure there are plenty of professional engineers already who would love to spend a bit of time working in an exotic country. It would also probably take years for me to get enough experience and knowledge to be any help at all, and even then there is still the chance that I wouldn't be wanted or needed by who ever is doing the project. Which comes back to the conclusion of the first bullet point in this section.
• While we're talking about helping out in other places, I may as well mention that most of the big problems in poor countries are incredibly simple problems and don't need fancy engineering solutions. For example, a simple well that can supply a whole village can be put in for a couple hundred dollars and mosquito nets for windows are pretty cheap too.
• Oh yeah and there's also the fact that I find working full time in an office incredibly boring and soul destroying. Especially during winter when it is dark when you get to work and dark when you leave. I've talked to a bunch of friends who have recently started working who have admitted that they feel similarly. For many of them their lives have become a rhythmic cycle of waking, working, watching TV and sleeping. Then drinking the weekend away and planning extravagant vacations to make up for it all.
  

On a different angle now, I think I've fallen in love with the Catholic Worker idea of voluntary poverty. It's the idea that it is not necessary for any of us to have more than is necessary. And it's the realisation that when ever we hold on to more than we ourselves need we are withholding it from those of our brothers and sisters who have less than they need. It's different than the poverty of destitution which many people are trapped by, but aims to provide just enough to meet our needs so that we can make the rest available to help others. Try it, you'll love it if you give it time. I think if I can commit to voluntary poverty for the rest of my life it will be pretty hard to start seeing poor people as lazy and to start talking about how rich people pay too much tax.

An idea I've been getting from many places lately is the need to be connected to the land. That might sound pretty hippy, but it makes a lot of sense. If we are in some way (the more ways the better) connected to the production of our own food, the collection of our own water, the sourcing of materials and construction of our own shelters - the provision of our own basic needs - we can't help but consume less and more responsibly. You might be wondering what I mean by "connection." Well, I've tried just now a couple times to explain it, but every attempt feels horribly inadequate. The best I can do is to suggest (and I highly recommend the benefits of this suggestion) you dig up whatever grass or pavement you have access to and try to grow as many vegetables as you can this summer (which means planning and planting from early spring or before) by as natural means as possible and using as few external inputs as possible. This will make you realise how very little you know about the amazing ground we walk over every day, which sustains our very life and yet which we treat with the utmost disrespect.

Being more connected to the marginalised people in our society is another thing I would like to pursue and encourage. These are the people who need the most help. Society is not designed with them in mind and it doesn't usually do very well at adapting for them. By being in contact with them regularly, but not just in contact, by actually being connected to them by friendship, job, neighbourhood, and whatever other ways I can manage, I hope to avoid forgetting about, neglecting and ignoring these people as it can be so easy to do.

Then I also want to make sure I never let the end justify the means. This is especially important when we're talking about the pursuit of some distant utopia, whether it is anarchic or not (though can utopia really be anything other than anarchic?) because (without wanting to sound pessimistic - and believe me I'm not) the means may very well be as close to the ends as we'll ever get.

The last thing is to ensure that I'm always living as part of a healthy community (or at least a community trying to be healthy) full of generous, caring and accepting people who will give me support and I can in turn support. We need each other in our everyday lives, in our attempts to build cooperative and equitable realities and in our struggle against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against spiritual wickedness in high places! (Ephesians 6:12 if you're interested). Why settle for just a nuclear family when you can have a whole community?

Oh yeah and I think getting some mean tattoos would be a good way to affirm my commitment to living a life less ordinary, and a good way to make me feel stink in future if I ever do abandon my morals in pursuit of comfort and luxury. So I got a couple in Brisbane from my good friend Anna. I might show you if you're lucky.

Thanks for caring and reading and thinking, but don't let it stop here!

Christchurch

Here are some ramblings for you since I haven't written anything for a while.

I'm in Christchurch and it is cold. That's good because it is winter and it is supposed to be cold. Soup also tastes heaps better when it is cold. I have to wear shoes again though which is not so good.

I caught up with a friend from highschool and then met a mate from Auckland down here. Duncan and I hung out at the Otautahi Social Centre a bit and tried some impressive strawberry pilsner and did heaps of dumpster runs on some awesome DIY bikes. There was a homemade chopper/cruiser bicycle thing made from a kids BMX with front fork extensions and an old 10-speed converted to a single-speed with only one real pedal and a trailer made from a shopping cart to carry the treasure we found. We looked a real sight riding around Christchurch in the middle of the night and the early morning, especially after we found the santa hat and tinsel. We ended up meeting a hilarious homeless couple who took the hat off our hands as well as some grapes and gloves and things thanks to Duncan.

Duncan and I also headed to the South Pacific Christian Anarchist conference this weekend which was great. It was at Onuku Marae near Akaroa and has stunningly beautiful surroundings. As hippy as it might sound, it is good to be around familiar trees again. Australian vegetation is really cool, but for some reason I found it really comforting to be around native vegetation here which is so familiar and reassuring.

The conference was top quality, as far as conferences for Christian Anarchists in the South Pacific go. There was over thirty people and an excess of wholesome dumpster food and much good discussion to be had. It was cool to see people I hadn't seen in years in some cases and meet plenty of new people with similar ideas and ideals. I am looking forward to getting home though.

It is tiring spending three months meeting totally new people everyday and saying goodbye to them almost as quickly. Not having your own space or any contact with people who really know you well is taxing also. So I reckon don't ever let me travel alone again, and make sure I don't try and do so many things next time either, no matter how tempting it is. For me I also found it hard being so focused on learning and talking and exploring without too many opportunities to do practical, productive things.

Squatting

I wrote this a few weeks ago when I was in Melbourne and I've just now fixed it up a bit and posted it. I'll be in Christchurch on Tuesday and then slowly making my way back up towards the final destination of Auckland, so let me know if you want me to add you to the list of pit-stops along the way.

Squatting is much more common place here than in Aotearoa. At least amongst the alternative/activist/anarchist/punk scene, I imagine there aren't too many middle management types embracing the squatter lifestyle.

In case you are wondering, squatting is the practice of occupying and living in a building, or on a piece of land which you don't hold any "legal" right to occupy. Successful urban squatting usually happens in run-down buildings with absentee landlords who own much more property than is good for them (or good for the rest of us) and haven't given the place a thought in years, or are waiting for a better market or something silly like that. At this point you may find yourself thinking, "Oh my, this is all rather criminal isn't it?". If so, then next time I see you I will explain exactly why there shouldn't be anything criminal at all about having access to food, water and shelter, and why the whole notion of criminality is not at all helpful to us. As the ever-quotable David Rovics puts it, "Why should some have seven homes, when some don't have any?"

By all accounts squatting is a lot easier to pull off here. Melbourne is obviously bigger than any city in Aotearoa, our whole population is only just larger than that of this city. Despite the fact that Australia is experiencing a massive housing crisis at the moment there is still a bunch of forsaken and entirely inhabitable buildings sitting around just waiting to be liberated from the the chains of their oppressive emptiness.

Squatting is not only a good way to lessen your weekly expenses, but those that choose to squat (as opposed to those who, for lack of money and opportunity, have no other option) generally do so as a direct act of defiance against a society in which everything is commodified and the essentials of life must be purchased at whatever value the 'market' determines. As some would have it, the ability to live and breath must be purchased and the money to purchase your own life must be earned by participation in the capitalist economy. Those of us who find the pursuit of profit above all else and the exploitation of workers to subsidise the leisure of the elite morally repulsive (not to mention boring and lifeless), are left in a difficult position.

So squatting is a very tempting option and effective way to eliminate almost entirely any need to participate in what is a repulsive and fundamentally flawed system in urgent need of replacement. There are numerous tricks of the trade to avoid paying for things such as water, power, food and furniture when squatting, although sometimes luck has it that a landlord hasn't even bothered to have the power or water turned off. Once again, I know, "That's stealing!", ask me about that next time too.

As a side note, shoplifting is another practice which it isn't surprising to find support for amongst those inclined to squat. I don't want to get in depth, but the general idea is that when shoplifting from a huge company, it doesn't hurt anyone. What it does do is ever so slightly and inconsequentially lower the enormous profits made by the shareholders of the corporation, which in order to put their product on the shelf in the first place has had to pollute and destroy the environment and exploit workers in numerous countries, including those behind the counter in that very store. It also saves the shoplifter once again from the moral tragedy of participation in these unfortunate realities.

Personally, I haven't shoplifted since I stole a pack of chewing gum Mum wouldn't let me buy at the video store when I was 6 (she made me return it and apologise), but perhaps only because shops hold so little which I ever have need for and can't get in other ways. Just as most people would not deny a starving child the right to steal a loaf of bread to eat, if I truly needed something, I would have no problem stealing it, only I would have the hatred of exploitation to justify my actions in addition to the necessity defence.

See you soon, land of the long white cloud here I come!

Brisbane

I'm in Brisbane. All is well. I'm doing this two week live-in exploration of community-building, and ideas and issues related to the concept of community and related to attempting to create and promote community. That is the best way I can think to explain it.

I can't be bothered typing much, so here is a short list of some cool things I've been up to if for some reason you feel you really need to know...

-wearing a lot of bare feet
-exploring incomplete skyscrapers
-being a part of cooking for 16 people amongst which are vegetarians, vegans, and hyperallergenic people with not very much at all they can eat (most fruits and vegetables, not to mention most of everything else makes them sick!)
-lots of interesting "food gathering/scavenging" activities

The Aboriginal People

A lot of people sleep on the streets here. A lot of people ask you for money as you walk around the inner city. A lot of them are Aboriginal people.

For 50,000 years the Aboriginal people have lived in this land that is now known as Australia. There were hundreds of thousands of them and they spoke hundreds of different languages. Now, as with all indigenous victims of colonialism, they are left with few options. Unfortunately, the most viable options are usually complete assimilation with no connection to their past, or exile to what we consider the least desirable sections of land. Even more unfortunately, the transition to the culture of their occupier's isn't achieved and they fall somewhere between the two options, that being life on the streets.

There was an impressive building just down the road from where I stayed in Melbourne that used to be an Aboriginal Health Centre set up by the local Aboriginal community there in Fitzroy. It is a grand old stone building painted in three grand horizontal stripes with the striking black, yellow and red of the Aboriginal flag. It has fallen into disrepair and some years ago stopped functioning as a health centre, but still should be under the terms of its 99 year lease and in the hands of the local indigenous people. However, the government has agreed to give the building over to a group called Mission Australia that will turn the building into a restaurant. The restaurant will operate a training program for young Aboriginal people which will enable them (if they are up to standard) to wait hand and foot on well to do whiteys in Australia's fine dinning establishments.

The struggle for the community to retain control over the building and to have it providing them with essential services rather than training them to serve dinner to their colonial masters is not yet over, but unfortunately it isn't looking good. I wish them all the best in this struggle and the many others they face.

Like...

The Northern Territories Intervention!

Today is the one year anniversary of John Howard's military intervention into 73 indigenous communities in Northern Australia. It is still going on now and it is still immoral, illogical and illegal. In order for the Intervention to take place the government had to suspend the Racial Discrimination Act and the Northern Territory Land Rights Legislation. Surprisingly, it could be said that there is legal precedent for this, as it is not the first time that the Racial Discrimination Act has been suspended here!

A report released last year entitled The Little Children Are Sacred highlighted high rates of child abuse and alcohol abuse in aboriginal communities, and was used as the justification for the intervention. However, not one of the 97 proposals in the report have been followed through with. The intervention has failed to deliver any benefits for the invaded communities, unless exasperation and racial discrimination can be considered benefits.

The first thing to be done in the intervention (other than to send in soldiers, trucks and guns) was to ban alcohol and pornography from these communities. This is not done anywhere else in Australia, especially not in any white communities, no matter how bad their rates of child abuse may be, and can not be seen as anything other than racial discrimination (good thing that act was suspended). Then people on benefits were hit hard. Children had to be submitted to invasive health checks or else their parents wouldn't get their money, and then when they did get their money they could only spend it at certain big supermarket stores via some sort of voucher system. Many communities didn't even have these stores in their communities and so had to go to the exasperation, effort, loss of time, extra expense, etc. of travelling to other towns to shop for their basic needs. Some things have been laxed now and I understand that getting food is a little easier, but things are far from back to normal and even further from being any better than they were pre-intervention.

Some other issues that this intervention link to are that of police brutality, especially toward aboriginal people in custody, and also the extraction of minerals from aboriginal land. These are two huge issues by them selves and I don't have the energy to write about them now.

While thinking about the discrimination and oppression the Aboriginal people have suffered and continue to suffer here, I am constantly reminded of the similar way which the Maori people continue to be treated in Aotearoa. Particularly the humiliation that the people of Tuhoe were confronted with on October 15th last year during the invasion of the lands over which they still exercise sovereignty. My love and solidarity is with all the October 15th arrestees, and the self-determination of the Maori people,

Ka whawhai tonu matou, ake, ake, ake.


P.S. As a side note it is interesting to know that Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the USA all have horrific histories of oppressing the indigenous people of the lands they now assume as their own and these countries are the only four to refuse to sign the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Surprise, surprise.

Dayboro

I'm on a Catholic Worker farm in a little place called Dayboro right now, it is awesome. There are dozens of fruit trees, 2 ducks, 3 chickens, a windmill, multiple solar energy utilisation operations, soap making, beer brewing, wine fermenting, soy fermenting, bio-diesel processing, rain-water harvesting, humanure composting, worm farming, small scale earth damming, bread baking, pretty much everything you could ever ask for. I'm living in a caravan (caravans are so sweet) under a house occupied by a family of 9.

Go read about the Catholic Worker movement on Wikipedia, especially about Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin and Ammon Hennessy, they are all dead now, but they were awesome. Catholic Workers are usually staunch pacifists, but believe in direct action and have supported unions and the Cuban revolution (kind of), and women's suffrage (although few of them ever vote) and all sorts of things. They are usually heavily involved in anti-war movements, most notably as "Ploughshares" activists. They believe in trying to make a society where it is better for people to be good. They have this idea of a new society that they are trying to bring about via "Round table discussions, Houses of Hospitality, and Agronomic Universities." So I'm pretty much in an agronomic university right now, and I'll tell you what, it is way better than Auckland University! They are keen on a craft based society which is pretty cool - I want to be a soap maker (amongst other things) after the Catholic Worker Revolution and make amazing smelling soaps like Peppermint and Green Tea! I don't have the time (that's not true at all, but it feels so wrong to be on a computer here) or the bandwidth to write more about it right now, so you'll have to be happy with an "easy essay" from Peter Maurin and then an un-nursery rhyme that I found here in a great little book that Barricade Books used to sell and hopefully still does...



The world would become better off
if people tried to become better.
And people would become better
if they stopped trying to become better off.



There was a crooked man
Who walked a crooked mile
He found a crooked sixpence
Against a crooked stile
He bought a crooked cat
Which caught a crooked mouse
And they lived together
In a crooked house
And he put his crooked sixpence
In a crooked national bank
And the crooked bankers spent it
By buying crooked tanks
Which they sold to crooked governments
To win their crooked wars
So all the crooked imperialists
Could enforce their crooked laws
And the biggest crooked irony
In all the crooked state
Was that all the crooked dealers
Considered themselves straight

Music

Music is very important. This song by Tin Tree Factory does a great job of expressing a lot of my sentiments. A lot of their songs do, you should listen all of them, but this one is particularly good and this is what most of the lyrics are. It is called Verbose, and I just realised when writting it out it can sound a little angsty, but it doesn't come across that way when you listen to it, so you should listen to it, and all the others here. (Revolution Pop is great and so is If which is also known as Goddam Condos I think)


Sit me down you're going to tell me a story and
Make believe it like is was the first time
Cause the message is redundant
And it makes no sense at all
Fill me in on all the history and politics,
Fill me in on all the places and things
Just to justify the reason
For no justice at all
Economically there's no better system
Governmentally there's no better way
You say that we can't change it
And our backs against the wall

We can dance together, on this broken record
We can dance together, on this broken record

I'll tell you what I think about your _______ ______ stories
The kind you never leave a _______ section about
The winners wrote the history
And they wrote the real people out
Technological discoveries are not going to save us
In fact they have this funny way of making it worse
Cause profit over people will take the real stuff out
I'm living like I'm living because I am searching
I'm living like I'm living because it's more fun
You won't belive me when I tell you
You won't believe me when I shout

That progress is not always forward
There's this social construction called race
And there is no binary gender
And there upon I plead my case

We can dance together, on this broken record
We can dance together, on this broken record

A butterfly can flap it's wings and topple an empire
A butterfly can flap it's wings and hover in space
It all depends on how you work it
Depends on how many people know
Don't give me all this crap about this being a phase
Don't say, "I thought like that when I was your age"
Just because you feel guilty
Because you sold your soul
This little song and dance that we are putting together
Is ending now because we are getting carried away
You will never change me
Because I already know

That progress is not always forward
There's this social construction called race
And there is no binary gender
And there upon I plead my case

Oh progress is not always forward
There's this social construction called race
And there is no binary gender
And there upon I've made my case

We can dance together, on this broken record
We can dance together, on this broken record