The Evil In Our World Never Stops….

By Donald “Braveheart” Stewart

As I sit in my Kailyard I often wonder about the future.

He thinks nae sma drink o himsel

As I sat contemplating life this week, the news arrived that Jacinda Ahern, who had no more in the tank, had resigned as the prime minister of New Zealand. Over the last few years, she has been held up as a leader of substance as she closed her country against COVID and dealt with the shooting of Muslims in one of the worst terrorist attacks of the century thus far with immeasurable dignity. We were all in awe of her influence.

However, these two issues aside, the powerhouse of New Zealand politics, who also gave birth whilst in office, has a set of issues at home with which she has struggled to deal. Ordinary New Zealanders are suffering like many throughout the world with rising costs and increasing levels of poverty. It led her to a conversation with herself which meant she felt it should be somebody else leading her party and charging ahead for the country.

In more trivial news this week I also saw that, in San Francisco, an art gallery owner had been arrested following their hosing down of a homeless woman. It can be hard to see the parallels between them, but it is all to do with privilege and how you exercise it.

Ahern treasured her role and was humble when exercising the power, she had. At least, that was what we on the other side of the world felt and thought when we heard her speak and witnessed the actions, she undertook in order to protect her country. It was authority exercised with an element of care and worry over what effect she was having, and how this affected ordinary people: ordinary people who may, at some point, find themselves through no fault of their own in dire straits.

And then we get a 71-year-old who feels that the woman outside of his gallery is due a dressing down, or a hosing down. It speaks violence to pain. It speaks of how some people who have a status within their own communities, or more importantly within their own heads, feel that they can exercise that power without a thought to the authority which they assume. In fairness, the gallery owner has said his actions were indefensible and has apologized – perhaps because it could cost him heavily and could lead to jail time. But I am beginning to feel that my judgment is as skewed towards somebody as this gallery owner’s was towards the unfortunate individual struggling outside of his gallery.

Parallels have been drawn, by the city’s mayor to the way in which civil rights protesters were treated by the police in the recent past. And to be fair, there is a line to be drawn between them.

The gallery owner told us that he and many in the business community had done a great deal to try and help the woman. There were claims made that a plethora of calls had been made to try and get help through police and social services, but those calls had gone unheeded. Frustration had obviously grown over inaction, and someone lost their head.

In short, this is a complex issue rather than one where we can allow our prejudice to hold sway. The resignation of a prime minister is also a complex one and whilst we over here have a very positive view of her over there, it may be that for many in New Zealand, the star status of their prime minister hid the very real problems faced by ordinary people in the country.

In short as we look up at those in charge of us and those for whom status is very important, we should try not to judge but to understand, especially those who may allow that power to make them more arrogant than understanding. Diving below the surface is how humanity gets moved along, forward and not backwards. It ought to remind us that there were times recently, when we collectively decided things should change. And perhaps the mayor should answer why his social services did not respond, if the number of calls going unheeded is accurate.
Society should be judged by how it treats those in pain, and not by its successes.

Here the community appears to have shown how broken it is and how compassion can end up in frustration if people don’t put their shoulders collectively to the wheel.

And as for those who refuse to show humility when their wrongdoing or ill-judged actions are highlighted? For them mirroring their judgment of others is more than acceptable.
A view from the new Kailyard or, how you look over there, from over here…

(Kailyard n. a cabbage patch, often attached to a school of writing – the Kailyard School – a genre of overly sentimental and sweet Scottish literature from the late 19th century where sentimental and nostalgic tales are told in escapist tales of fantasy, but here we seek to reverse it by making the Kailyard Observations of effective invective comment from that looks not to return to the past but to launch us into a better future by the one Donald worth believing…

He thinks nae sma drink o himsel – Some people think very highly of themselves.

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