Every now and again, you get a surprise as a blogger

Every now and again, you get a surprise as a blogger. A few days ago, I wrote something that was supposed to be a little edgy and controversial and badass - but then everyone AGREED with it. WTF?

Well, almost everyone.

I'm referring to my post on returning Upper Hutt and Lower Hutt to their true and rightful names, Whakatiki and Te Awakairangi. It's not an original idea - pretty sure the tangata whenua came up with it first - but it's got my vote.

I can tell this idea's good from its opponents' responses. The best retort I've seen is that changing our cities' names will cost money. There'll need to be things like new letterheads and business cards.

OK, I'll play along. I can and will Karen the shit out of any and all counter-arguments, until nothing remains but ashes.

The cost of change isn't irrelevant. Money's important: just ask anyone who doesn't have it.

But I'll let you in on a secret. Something really, really expensive is decades of systemic racism. Tally up the cost of kids failing in a school system that marginalised them. Add a prison system more than half comprised of brown faces. Unequal economic opportunities. Alienated land.

I could go on, but maths is hard for me and this number's getting too big to count, even on all eleven of my fingers.

Oscar Wilde, a slightly better-known writer than me, said 'a cynic is a man who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing'. Money matters, but it isn't all that matters. When we fail to grasp this, we run a big old monocultural steamroller over the values of the people who named our cities first.

Here's what I reckon: if letterheads and business cards seem like the things that matter most right now, that's an invitation to rethink.

Aotearoa: don't let stationery keep us stationary.