Opportunities abound

Clive Bibby

Opinion

I can’t remember a time during the past two decades when opportunities for completing long overdue projects across so many different spheres of society were there for the taking.

Yet, if you watched or read the daily news you would assume that anybody with a desire to bring about change would be confronted with so many roadblocks, that the effort just wasn’t worth the trouble.

Why is this depressing appearance of inertia and stagnation so prevalent in this modern age? Surely, we are better than that.

Well, yes, we are but there needs to be some housekeeping before we embark on the mission so many see as impossible. We can’t keep on blaming one another for limiting progress towards a better and more sustainable world.

When you really search for answers, it quickly becomes noticeable that our problems are not entirely due to somebody else or group or some law that prevents change — the problem is us, or most of us. As long as we continue to point the finger at others as being the root cause of our inability to make the changes necessary, we will continue to drift towards anarchy.

And the irony is that all this could be avoided if we individually decided to honestly examine why we can’t accept that “United we stand — divided we fall!”

All we have to do is to put aside our sense of entitlement, no matter how much we believe we have been robbed or denied access to opportunities, and commit to a programme that requires a contribution from every one of us.

Let’s look at a few examples of the things that continue to divide us and prevent this unified march towards the truly egalitarian society we can become — a goal that is still achievable in this country at least.

The one thing that sets us apart from the rest of the world is that our problems, particularly those involving racial differences, are eminently solvable in spite of the radicals who use continued division as a means to achieve their own ideological objectives.

As a nation, we need to tell these destructive minority groups that they can take their place alongside the rest of us, or get out of the way and let us get on with it.

Most people in this country are familiar with the mistakes made during our development as a multicultural society, but few other democracies have made it this far without civil wars or internal unrest.

Fortunately, for us Kiwis, we are not yet locked into the downward spiral that plagues much of the free world. We can decide to work together for the betterment of us all, and the price will simply be a change of attitude towards one another.

There is no need for grand gestures of reconciliation or fawning demonstrations of guilt — just a commitment to changing the way we do things, in harmony with the environment that sustains us.

We simply need to say sorry for the mistakes of the past if we haven’t already done so, and use the mechanisms already in place for compensating those who have been wronged. (There’s no need to change the laws based on a false narrative.) Then we can get on with identifying the opportunities that are there for the taking.

I can list a number of doable projects just waiting to be taken up here in my neck of the woods, and have no doubt the rest of the country is looking at similar opportunities — it just requires a change in attitude and a commitment from us all to finding a way.

This is us! Sorry Jacinda and her mates at the UN — we can do it without you.