I have never, and will never, vote for Christopher Luxon. I find him out of touch, condescending, and the type of two-1 caricature who would view his own success as the sole product of his hard work and not the advantages that were given to him through socio-economics, education, race, and privilege. The danger to that line of thinking is that, like any good dealer, if you start to get high on your own shit, you start to wonder why people struggle at all. I mean, if Chris could do it, why couldn’t everyone in Nawton? I mean, what magic ingredients were tradies and welders missing that they couldn’t ‘ Live, Laugh, Luxon?’ It must be his work ethic, surely?

Ok, I am stopping myself before the entire focus of this is Luxon or Seymour or any of the Slytherin we call a government. The point I took a whole paragraph to get to is that I can dislike someone or not vote for them without resorting to the hyperbole that is creeping into our discourse. Luxon may be horrible, but he has some way to go before he earns comparisons to Hitler. But that is where we go now. The internet gives every anonymous voice the chance to talk shit, and it is intoxicating! I mean the stuff I would say to Tehana every day about her beloved Tottenham Hotspurs. I would be completely out of control if I knew she would never meet me. 

The problem isn’t the internet, though. It is us. Nobody goes for reasoned analysis of anything anymore. They go straight to the apocalypse. An anonymous commenter  in the Herald last week said, “If free school lunches are taken away, it will be the worst thing to happen in this country since the Treaty.” Taking away the ambiguity of the comment, it means that the school lunch removal rates higher than at least four massacres, two earthquakes, land confiscation, the destruction of Te Rēo in schools, and the Rhys Darby romantic comedy ‘Love Birds,’ We are out of control as a society.

It isn’t just here, either. If you believe parts of America at 81, Joe Biden is an addled skeleton waiting for the Grim Reaper, where a 79-year-old Trump is young and ready to lead. The point is if we spend all our times at the extremes of our politics and the extremes of our language, then where the fuck do we go from here?

I’d love to offer a solution, but I hear World War III is about to start thanks to Biden’s socialised Medicine, and the COVID vaccine that I willingly got will eventually lead me to spontaneously combust because I once said I didn’t think Jacinda was the best Prime Minister. So I have my own shit to deal with. You can sort the internet.