Tread lightly.
My tolerance is finished.
I never inquired whether you were LGBTQ, or whatever acronym you call yourself, until you started shoving it down my throat and teaching it to my children.
I didn’t mind what colour you were until you started blaming mine for your problems.
I never asked where you were from until you condemned people for their birthplace and their history.
I never wondered whether your religious beliefs were different from mine until you told me my beliefs were wrong.
I never cared whether you were prosperous or poor (I’ve been both) until you screamed in the street that my success came not from hard work but from some mythical privilege of my colour. Are you saying there are no prosperous blacks, no poor whites?
I never cared about your political affiliation until you “de-platformed” me, but that made me curious about your political beliefs (I still don’t care about your political affiliation) — you want to control our speech in this great country of ours, and that just will not do.
You’ve taken our religion, our history, our children and our family system. You’ve meddled with our sexuality, our language, our stories, our schools and universities, laws and institutions and now you hate us even for the climate, which is doing just fine. You refuse to praise our scientists, engineers and mathematicians for our prosperous life, now people are better educated and fed, we produce more food on less land and we are all healthier than ever.
You have broken much of our society and continually mock the respectable, the honourable and the old.
Tread lightly — there are millions like me.
We want our country back.
– Anonymous
(much changed from the original)
– h/t Deborah Alexander, who received it earlier today
Views: 12
“My Country”. You do not own this country, you are merely borrowing it from your children under the condition that you should leave it in a better state than you found it.
I suspect the author is not a New Zealander, this country is far more tolerant than it was in the past.
Borrowing? I appreciate the duty of care in the idea, but other than that it’s just not logical. They didn’t even exist when I started work. No, I’m building and improving the country before my children take it over when they’re ready. Anyway, with property rights as they still exist here, I do actually own a piece of the country. It’s strange you should claim I don’t — your explanation makes it clear that my parents borrowed it from me as owner.
The author sounds American, though half of this wee essay is mine by now, and I’m a Kiwi. More tolerant? Yes it is, though it depends on the weight you assign to the modern issues of LBGTQ, hurty words and the degradation of education and the historical sins of colonisation, slavery and the remarkable improvements in living standards created in the various colonies.
Dear Simon, it would be hard to reach a contract with this ‘condition’ with those who are not yet born, or do you have some access to the astral plane that other mere mortals do not?
“I’ll have my country back now” implies that you want to take it away from others who claim to be a part of it. Being a landowner should not be the criteria, a large subset of the population will never own property.
Improvements in living standards happened despite the bigotries and inequalities of the past not because of them.
Simon,
No, I say take “back”, not “away”. I should have been clearer that it’s a response to attempts to degrade, distort and corrupt the principles this country was founded on, principles that generations of English citizens fought and died for. Principles that are the foundation of a free, prosperous, safe, equitable and conservative nation.
I strongly agree with you that improvements happened despite bigotry and inequality before the law and, further, that modern efforts that effectively unwind these improvements or establish divided principles of law are just new bigotries that must be stoutly refused.
You are losing it Simon.
Coming up with stuff like “we are merely borrowing it from our children “.
Most people I know are helping their children to get ahead in their chosen profession or business and do their best to help them buy their first homes .
Our children are borrowing from us usually with no interest and no expectation of having to pay the loans back .
We are all New Zealanders and a great many of us have worked very hard all our lives to make this country a better place to live in .
I cannot say that for a lot of residents as so many find work is to hard and others have a chip on their shoulder believing that the government should pay them a universal wage so they can do their own thing.
Why is there a labour shortage on farms that has to be filled with workers from overseas ?
Housing is supplied and with minimal rent they do well and become good hard working citizens .
I was at school in the 1950s and I can not recall any racism
We were all students and we mixed in all activities and after leaving school all sports teams came from many back grounds and no one ever noticed the colour of the next persons skin in the scrum.
Recently the city of Hamilton removed the statue of Captain Hamilton , the excuse was to protect it from vandalism?
More tolerant I don’t think so Simon and now they are going after Captain Cook , Sir George Grey and any other historical figure that they despise.
Graham
RT, there is only one side here that is dishonest and destructive and that is Simon’s pathetic suburban marxist lot. Are they stupid? Are they evil? I have years of evidence that they are both and more.
They are now taxing the warmth of folk in such places as the Otago Hoar Frost country. Next year they commence to drive my Farming Colleagues to Ruin and Suicide. Treason of course, and we shall treat it as so.
Yet they have pseudonymous publishing rights, in my Homeland. Not realising how they chase the end of all Traitors. Brett Keane
Brett,
What are these two crimes? I’ve not heard of them, I think.
RT: All tied up with the first tranches of the Carbon Taxes on Organic Chemistry, the Science of all Life, the idiots. BK
The Simons of this world are bringing the Age of Enlightenment to an end. They do not understand that freedom of expression is a sacred right obtained by the loss of many lives. Under the cover of hate speech — hate being determined by social media mob rule — we are seeing the brown shirts reappear in green.
Yes, it’s a grim outlook, all right. More important than ever to practice the virtues of the Enlightenment. I must look them up. – RT