Thought for the day, 30 June 2024

The lefty-liberal part of me, who likes to find carefully-reasoned sociological causes for everything, is wrestling with the grumpy middle-aged bit.

When my cat got killed, it only occurred to me later - much later - that it could have been a child. We were living in Te Awa Kairangi Upper Hutt, on a street off the main drag: Fergusson Drive. Both Fergie Drive, as the locals call it, and my own street were favourite routes for boy racers. I can’t say for sure that it was a boy racer who killed my much-loved Kōwhai, but the woman who saw it happen, and who I hugged as she cried over his thin body at the side of the road, said they didn’t even stop.1

More importantly, some two hundred metres from my house and on Fergie Drive, another driver didn’t stop. They’d hit a man in his 60s. Last I knew, the man was seriously injured, and the police were still looking for the driver.

Before we lived in Upper Hutt, we lived in Naenae - on a particular bend in the road with perils that never occurred to us when we bought the place. We came home from a family holiday once, and someone had driven into the wooden fence we’d paid for from a slim family budget to keep the kids safe; smashing the tanalised palings like kindling.

Still, we were better off than the folks on the other side of the bend. Their fence was smashed so many times they paid heaven knows what to have two-tonne concrete blocks installed on their verge. You get a little desperate, I guess, when you imagine time and again the crushed bodies of your small children.2

It’s not like people my age are blameless, didn’t do stupid shit either. But the ones who gambled didn’t always win. Up the road from the place I grew up, in the town of Gore, a bunch of kids went hooning one day. The little boy they hit died instantly, the force knocking him out of his small gumboots. And the car barely missed the little boy’s younger brother. When the driver was sentenced to prison, he looked barely older than the kid whose life he’d taken.

These days I live in a subdivision, still in Upper Hutt. The streets are carefully designed to be unwelcoming to cars: short and with small chicanes, so you couldn’t speed if you wanted to. Where cars are unwelcome, kids flourish. They come out on scooters and with balls, unselfconscious and happy, like it’s a time gone by. But the boy racers still run the perimeter of the subdivision, and sometimes they wake me up. That might sound like a moan - but when you have a chronic illness, sleep matters, just as it does if you have a baby or a shift you need to work. I mean, these are things a person shouldn’t have to justify.

I am painfully aware of the potential for political spectacle: of throwing the book at spotty 19-year-old boys while every other injustice we tolerate marches on, from white collar crime to family violence. There were helicopters out last night over the Hutt Valley, and community group commenters reckoned it was the much-publicised police crackdown on boy racers. Some were bothered: many more were in support.

But sometimes I don’t feel safe. I’ve had far more brushes with crime than the average person - to the extent I kind of shrug it off - but the revving in the night still raises my heartbeat a little.3

You can put it down to still-developing brains: you’d be right, at least in part. You can speculate what’s wrong with our culture, that this self-defeating shit seems like the best way to rebel. I’ve no idea what’s the answer; how we avoid stigmatising young people, but still keep them and the rest of us out of harm’s way.

I just know firsthand how grave the consequences can be - and that bravado, like booze, feels much better at the time than in the morning.

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