Prisoners forever?

I just answered a poll on the stuff.co.nz website: Should prisoners be given a healthier range of food? Answer: Yes. 62% said no...
It may be a bit farfetched, but I reach the conclusion that this majority-part of the population also believes that prisoners should never be forgiven, they should rot in jail, much like the green loaves of bread we are giving them, they should die because they are bad and they are a threat to society and the status quo. The Status Quo Ante. I do not know what sort of food prisoners eat. I do know that the facilities they are incarcerated in tend to be rather fabcy in this part of the world, which sparks the question that 62% ask: Aren't they meant to be penitent of their actions? Answer: Yes.
We are all filled with a sentiment of remorse when we do something we know is wrong, what if there is no alternative? Should a bank robber be enjailed forever, if all he was trying to do was to provide some means for his family? If this person happens to be black or indigenous in a still racist socoety, how do we know the crime they committed is one they are in fact guilty of?
I'm too naive to think people are bad, and even more to believe that people cannot improve. We all do things we regret and we also do things because we need to. Families do tend to take priority over the system, and mine does too. If I were in a desperate enough situation to have to steal food from a supermarket in order to keep my kids healthy I would steal that supermarket. I'd be scared, no one wants to go to jail; even if it does have satellite TV, a gym, library, etc. There is another factor though, some jails are so much better than the society the criminals live in that it is better and more life-saving to be in jail than to walk the streets in a gang whose use is the protection of communities.
On food, should we give them better food? Yes, why? Because prisons are meant to rehabilitate. This is why there are workshops, criminals are obliged to do community service, go through counselling sessions. They aren't people born naturally defective, we cannot hide them behind high walls forever. Like a toy, if it comes out broken whose fault is it, the toy's or the machine's? I'd say the lattter, we cannot blame something on an inanimate object. We aren't inanimate but we do learn from the way we've been raised. I'd say the environmental factors are key in distinguishing who is going to turn out well or not. Genetics has a role; some people are naturally more aggressive or have more addictive personalities but these genetic differences will be pushed to the for by environmental injustices.
Why should they have better food? Simply because they should learn how to eat healthily so that they do when they leave prison. Then there children, if these prisoners have actually been rehabilitated, will stand a chance to grow healthily and in good environmental conditions.

This system throws more Maori in prison than Pakeha. Maori, as a fact are also poorer, there communities are unsafe due to the lack of jobs and because the youths parents are in prison. How are they meant to give their children a decent childhood if they aren't there? Maori also lost out in their culture, they were pushed away from their original communities and large family units into small private houses, uninhabited for the ten, eleven hours of work a week but for their children, who have no-one to teach them, show them or protect them.

Anzac: Why do we celebrate death?

Tomorrow we will be again seeing flags raised across New Zealand, bands piping at 7 am and crowds gathering around every cenotaph in the country. This is a commemoration of war, but is war worth remembering? Well of course we are not remembering war, but who we have lost in it. We remember the stupidity of war, we remember that killing people we don't know is irrational when they have done nothing to us. Because they haven't personally, nor has their country. We remember all those who died for somebody else's war, the war of an empire our great-grandfathers may have never seen first hand.
This wasn't the war of our fathers nor our grandfathers, they are now our great-grandfathers, people so distant we can hardly imagine them. They didn't listen to the radio and half of New Zealand was still rural. All their information, all their sense of nationalism was very different to ours. They read newspapers that reported the information a week late and who were they but an amalgamation of Brits and Irish fighting for their livelihoods in a quite unknown climate? They still saw Maori as savages and some even hoped they would go extinct, like a beast...
So why do we remember those we do not know?
I guess I cannot really speak. I come from a nation, Catalonia, that celebrates the defeat to Spain and its empire on September 11th 1714. When the Spanish finished sieging my hometown Lleida in 1708, less than 2000 people were reported still alive. Hitherto Lleida had been an important agricultural centre, the most important city of a trade-route between Catalonia and Aragon and from there Spain, and was the seat of one of Europe's oldest universities, our contributions to the field of medecine are innumerable, in part because Jews and Muslims participated in scholarly life. Spain though destroyed the city and killed the wounded in the hospital of St Mary. All universities in Catalonia were torn down, in Lleida the Queen's castle, where she lived for 200 years was destroyed as well as all the other noble buildings. We went from 300 noble palaces to none, overnight. Saying that the city was destroyed is an understatement, it did not recover until the early 20th century. Spain prohibited the use of the Catalan language too and imposed military rule, further breaking up the territory, half of which had recently been given to France.
Yet we celebrate the loss. We are insistent and we survive, the language is blooming, 10th most important on the internet according to Google, culture re-rooting and we are looking at starting our own path once more. The two previous times we did led to the loss in 1714 and the loss in the civil war in 1939. Looking at 1714 shows the unity of the Catalan people and our tenacity, we never gave up. It is a source of pride.

New Zealand and Anzac could be something similar, in a sense it did unite the country in grief. 95 years since the first service and we still cry. New Zealand though wasn't fighting for itself, it was fighting for an empire that took lots from its colonies but seldom gave back. Moreover, Gallipoli is an example of racism:
My great-grandfather almost fought there. His regiment had been selected to train for it, in Tanganyika and in Gaza. Both of these were a failure, the army was left to jump off boats and sink- the navy did not want to get any closer. It was a failure in logistics repeated in Gallipoli and a success for the Turkish who in some areas were well outnumbered. My great-grandfather though was not allowed to fight because he was in the East Indian regiment. Churchill decided Gallipoli would be for the French and the British to recapture, Europe would be in safe hands once again as the oldest nations tied the continent back together. Because the Indians were not European, they were not allowed to attack, even though they had been preparing for it for the last year.
Anzac is a day of unity, almost every Kiwi has someone who fought in the Great War. New Zealand is a small country yet it committed itself more than anyone else. Gallipoli entitles the kiwi to a sense of pride much like Catalonia's, even though we may be small, we matter. We tread twice as hard to make ourselves heard. This sense of pride can be seen in every town and atop mountains and tomorrow New Zealanders will remember the dead there, but are we celebrating New Zealand or celebrating a bygone empire.

Why don't we celebrate the day New Zealand was discovered? Because it could be offensive to Maori. Why don't we celebrate the day Maori and Pakeha put down their arms after the Maori Wars? Because we slaughtered so many in order to take away their land.
New Zealand's problem is that it has to celebrate a day it truly united and it hasn't got one. Even in WWI many Maori iwi refused to participate. Maori did not see why they should be fighting for an empire that had abandoned them.

I bought a white poppy to show my stance on war: it kills. It doesn't mean I refuse to remember, it means I will not forget war's price. 2271 Kiwis died in Gallipoli, why are we still fighting then? Shouldn't Anzac day symbolise the day we put down arms and war remind us of what we should never do again?

Iwi fights Brazilian oil.

This is the second issue that has been hidden enough: Te Whanau a Apanui in the East Coast are protesting against the inspection of oil on their shore by the Brazilian oil-company Petrobras. Down in Dunedin on Wednesday, there was a protest 'celebrating' the first Birthday of the BP oil-spill in the Gulf of Mexico. We can probably all still remember the images of the platform on fire, the pipe gushing out this brown gulch and the beaches slowly getting covered in black. We can probably still remember the animals filthy with oil too. We do not want this to happen here too do we? This is what the iwi is protesting. At least someone is!
Just off Otago another oil company is inspecting oil too, with the permission to build two wells. The one off Dunedin closer than the deepwater horizon platform was from the US coast.

The Government claims that opening up the oil market in New Zealand- allegedly on one of the biggest oil fields in the world- will be beneficial for the economy. They are not taking into account the millions we will be losing in tourism, or the livelihoods of so many who depend on fishing. These fishers will instead have to work long shifts far from home around carcinogenics on minimum wage. This isn't improving the economy for the many, but for the few. The government has shares invested but we will be the ones doing the voluntary cleanups when the rig explodes. Petrobras, just for your information, is amongst the most unsafe companies in the business and even though New Zealand is earthquake prone and the waters rougher and deeper, they will not be using any new and advanced technology. A disaster seems likely and we are the ones paying for it. I personally don't want to see my taxes go to the death of a dozen yound men and women who have no chance of a better job and I certainly do not want to go out onto the beaches that I can see from my window to clean up a mess I did not want and did not create.

Te Whanau a Apanui isn't too big an iwi, but Greenpeace is backing them and the protesters are facing fines that hit the five digit mark, or jail. For peacefully opposing something they disagree with. 600 people protested up north, around 20 here but we need more. Petrobras is already fearing a public backlash, what are we waiting for? This isn't only protecting the environment, it is for Maori rights and to the benefit of us all.

Whenua - land

I had a conversation a few weeks ago that went something like this:
"I hate possums! They're a pest. They eat our native birds and we should get rid of them all!"
"Well... I know some people who would say the same about you..."
Touche.
Of course the conversation was much more than just that. But it's true. The last statement reflects the way many Maori feel about white people. I had to regret my words. We brought the possums in, it is our fault that the native wildlife is getting destroyed. It is also our fault that the native culture, language and peoples were destroyed so many years ago. Many politicians and those in government would like us to believe that this land is ours. After all we signed a treaty didn't we? But when they say 'ours' who do they mean? The treaty was left forgotten in a basement, water-ridden and being eaten by rats for thirty years.

This is also the situation endured by Maori. For a while the white man thought Maori would die out, Hoorah they said: "Taking all things into consideration, the disappearance of the race is scarcely subject for much regret. They axe dying out in a quick, easy way, and are being supplanted by a superior race." This a statement by a so-called Dr. Newman in 1881, in 1884 Sir Walter Buller only predicted twenty more years for the Maori race. It is no surprise then that the treaty was 'lost'.
Still now we hear comments saying that our arrival to New Zealand made things better. They were savages, cannibals. We gave them technology, education... We also destroyed the education they had, we destroyed their culture, we gave them a white god, we gave them drugs and alcohol.
The Maori situation still hasn't changed. While we boast that the indigenous peoples of New Zealand have a brighter future than any other indigenous people in the world thanks to the Treaty of Waitangi: a) this is something to mourn rather than celebrate. b) this doesn't mean the situation for Maori is 'good' c) the Treaty of Waitangi was only enshrined as a national document [and isn't a very good one] in 1975 with the Waitangi Tribunal.
Maori still now are much more likely to suffer from health problems, unemployment and poverty when compared to your average Pakeha. On the other hand, the Waitangi tribunal was set up after Maori started to protest for their rights to be equal [or maybe superior] to the white man, for the acceptance of their culture and to solve the disputes the white man created when he stole Maori land. Even though the protest movement died down, the situation isn't any better.
It is difficult to give a say on issues of race. It is easy for me to say that we should all have equal rights, because at the end of the day this is also what is best for me: an educated white boy. I personally think it'd be dumb to ask for a Maori only society, I can see where the desire comes from, but this would not create an equal society by definition, it would be a Maori and a Pakeha society, two separate ones, like Apartheid South Africa. At the same time society has to recognize that Maori start off handicapped because of their skin. They are more likely to fall into broken households where the parents haven't had a good access to education, thus bringing them into crime.
The first thing to do would be to recognize that this land is theirs, symbolically. Protesters in the Far North were recently arrested because they were occupying what they claimed to be their land. They were Maori and the land was a sailing club. "We're being arrested from our whenua" one said. They were protesting because this is where the ancient waka Mamaru landed for the last time. They want this land to be recognized as the tapu-sacred place it is. Te Ika a Maui and Te Waka o Aoraki both belong to Maori, if we are here we should consider it a privilege. As part of being a New Zealander we have to embrace Maori culture and language, only this way can we be truly bi-cultural. If the only way to achieve these changes is through protest, we will protest. Protests are what stopped the Apartheid machine on its tracks and what started the international boycott movement, protests are what give French a leeway against their government, protests are what made the situation better for Maori through the 70s and 80s, this is how they gained more rights. Protests allow us to tell the government that we are here too, that we matter and that we want what is rightfully ours, in this case an equal, multicultural New Zealand.
We should be wary of what the media says when it speaks about protests. They know they're effective, which is why they want to prove otherwise. Next time Maori or anyone else protests for further rights, we should join. The struggle can only be achieved through unity. And it's 4 million against John.