THE MADNESS OF IT ALL

My youngest mokopuna’s first birthday celebration last weekend was a welcome respite from the madding world.  Awestruck children encircled a towering melon and fruit cake in the faint light of a single flickering candle. 

A boisterous waiata gave way to pin-dropping silence; our collective breaths held to see if baby would actually blow it out: and among the older tamariki the fight broke out to be first at the candle after baby started crying.  Barking dogs and children’s laughter provided the soundtrack to a different, wonderful kind of madness.

But by Monday I’d returned to a world where, on the other side of the globe, the collective breaths of a nation waited in anticipation of their candle being extinguished by the Nobel Peace Prize winning American President who seems intent on a course of action that would have been called a war crime a generation ago.  His predecessor used the key words weapons of mass destruction to trump up support for the war on Iraq.  Western democracies bought and repeated the lie in their droves.  Today Obama’s key words to justify attacking Syria are this heinous crime.  Will Key and co line up eagerly to peddle that message?

But hang on a minute.  Do we really believe that the Syrian government staged a chemical attack days after United Nations Inspectors arrived in Damascus?  And closer to home, do we really believe that Maori Youth Crime is down 32%, as the Herald reported yesterday?  Was it really a misinterpretation of the law that led to 80 New Zealanders having their privacy breached?  And how was it that the botulism scare turned out to be a complete straw man?

Today’s media headlines couldn’t be better designed to intentionally stimulate fear and anxiety in us.  The steady jolts of bad news couldn’t be more carefully timed to keep us in a perpetual state of fight or flight, short–circuit our critical thinking, distract us from what is really important, and render us ngoikore. 

Aeschylus has been credited with saying, “In war, truth is the first casualty.”  If that’s true, then when future historians look back on the last twenty years, much the same way others studied the conditions that preceded The Great Depression and World War II, I wouldn’t be surprised if they dub this the Golden Age of Bulldust. 

We’d do well to remember Aeschylus’ words.  But as I recall the true joy and peace of my mokopuna’s birthday celebrations, I reckon we’d do even better to listen more to barking dogs and laughing children than to the world’s manipulated headlines and the madness of it all.