Thank you and bless you, whoever you are.
HELEN DOYLE
Whanganui
Inequity greatest problem
Our Māori ancestors loved life and liberty just as much as any other people.
I won't use the term race. We should all know that there is only one human race and that we are all in it together.
There can be no distinction on the basis of race, so this ridiculous idea that, without the arrival of Europeans, Māori would have killed themselves off can only be seen as xenophobia, a fear or intolerance of a different culture.
Aha! This may be the reason for the deliberate and systematic destruction of our Māori culture by the colonials and their successors. After all, they did label our Māori culture "beastly communism" and vowed to destroy it.
This aberration is still a part of the Kiwi culture, particularly in the court of public opinion.
Is this the reason for what I see as a strong resemblance to medieval England here in modern Aotearoa? If so, it's time for an overhaul of every aspect of our Government, and a good, hard look at Treaty settlements that are just more of the same.
Our statistics are shameful, and we should all be working toward a better future for our mokopuna.
Inequity is the greatest problem. That's what our Māori ancestors fought against, so you can't fault or blame them.
We should also be concerned about those atomic "mutually assured destruction" policies.
That means all of us, people. Wake up, NZ.
POTONGA NEILSON
Castlecliff
Trump a punishment
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, recently declared that God wanted Donald Trump to become president. I fully agree with her: just read your Old Testament.
God certainly wouldn't have wanted Mrs Clinton to be president: she had promised the Wall Street Mammon-worshippers it was them she would serve, and as the Bible tells us, you cannot serve both God and Mammon. By now Hillary would have had the USA invading Syria, Venezuela and the Crimea, killing thousands, just to make a few extra hundred billion dollars for those godless US armaments barons.
When God's chosen people sinned, God punished them by sending a bad leader who caused them great harm. The Americans have certainly committed great sins in the past 200 years: slavery of West Africans, genocide of native Americans, invasions of Mexico, Hawaii, the Philippines, China, Cuba, Iran, Vietnam, Chile, Iraq, Libya etc, plus the export of thousands of terrorists to Latin America. So God is now punishing the Americans by sending them a bad leader also.
If any of our logical left-brained readers find difficulty with these Biblical comparisons, may I suggest you take a look at Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire instead.
Gibbon considered the loss of civic virtue among the citizens of Rome to be the main reason its empire gradually succumbed to barbarian invasions.
The collapse of civic virtue by many people in Washington has been evident for some time, conflict is rife and the 2016 electronic invasion of the US by barbarian trolls and hackers successfully installed Russian assets in both the White House and Senate.
By Gibbon's logic, Washington is well into its decline, and its fall is inevitable.
JOHN ARCHER
Ohakune
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