Anzacs deserve our morning

Images of Eva Bradley for APN Regional Newspapers stock

YOU know you live in the land of milk and honey when getting your ponytail pulled is a matter of national significance. Furthermore, it is considered by some to be a breach of human rights.

While women in some countries would lose their head let alone any hair hanging in bunches from it if they even let a ponytail show, it is a testament to how seriously we take the rights of women in New Zealand that the Prime Minister is on political thin ice for what is, apparently, an abominable and wildly unacceptable gesture of misplaced bonhomie.

In case you're like me and were wondering where the real news was five minutes after "pony gate" broke and began dominating headlines, you can relax. I'm not going to say anything more about it.

What I am going to write about are the things that could and should have been taking up space in our news feeds instead this week ... chiefly, the 100-year anniversary of Gallipoli.

I am ashamed to admit that I have not got up early for a dawn service since my school made me do it in exchange for an extra service badge to pin on my blazer.

I have vague memories of highly charged emotions fired by the sound of a lone bugle playing the Last Post.

It was a surreal moment, and at the same time a very real one. It was a chance to plug into something greater than myself and feel connected to something infinitely bigger and more important than me.

Given the emotional payback from such a small investment, you have to wonder why I haven't been able to get out of bed and repeat the experience for the past 20 years.

A century is a big deal though. It matters more than a sleep in.

In fact I'm sure that when the young men of our young and fiercely free nation landed in Turkey and discovered hell on earth, they did not imagine a time when their grandchildren and great grandchildren would soak up the public holiday they earned for them with their lives but not be prepared to kick it off with a little bit of an early-morning thank you.

When I mentioned the idea of getting up for the dawn service to a friend I was amazed when they admitted they didn't really know what Gallipoli was.

It's all well and good to go on about "lest we forget" but in order to forget one actually had to be in the know in the first place.

And so this week in order to never be able to forget the sacrifice made by my forebears I have been making sure I know what there is to remember. I have been consuming the Gallipoli "special edition" sections of the various media, asking the odd old person in my life about what they knew about it as young tykes and soaking up history Hollywood-style with a couple of the flood of films timed to coincide with the anniversary.

All of it feels worryingly hard to relate to, and yet in recent times with the threat of foreign attack via lone-wolf terrorism we should relate so well.

Perhaps it is because patriotism and collectivism have been so resoundingly replaced by individualism and what's-in-it-for-me-ism in recent times that the idea of giving my life for my country just seems so unlikely.

As we celebrate this huge moment in our history, it is a wonderful chance to reflect on just what our forebears sacrificed so that we could live in a world where the worst thing to happen to a young Kiwi woman is to have her ponytail pulled.