Contradictions in a modern world

It is somewhat surprising that in an increasingly secular world the celebration of Christmas seems to be gathering more and more momentum. The commercial world undoubtedly initiates the fervour and there are more and more houses lit up with yuletide greetings, a multitude of channels beaming Christmas shows on television, and aisles and aisles of decorative ornaments, the majority of them ironically made in atheist China, packing the shelves of our superstores to eventually adorn the trees that invade our living rooms. Some enterprising folk are selling authentic pine saplings cocking a snook at the “genuine Taiwanese plastic” versions that have been making inroads for years.

We love Christmas for a variety of reasons, few of them religious. It heralds the start of the summer holiday season which usually means inclement weather right up until it’s time to go back to the grindstone. But mostly we enjoy the reaction of children - in my case grandchildren - the wide-eyed look on their faces as we reiterate the myths that entranced us when we were kids. That Father Christmas comes down the chimney and drinks the beer and eats the mince pies on the hearth and leaves behind the colourfully wrapped presents as a kind of quid pro quo.

I’m not sure just how modern day mums and dads get the jolly fat gentlemen into the confines of the log fire and through the glass fire door with a latch on the outside. I guess they’ve embellished the story to fit the composition of a contemporary home and anyway we were always desperate to believe the impossible even when some smart-alec worldly kid in the primers awakened us to the fact that we were being mightily deceived.

The real story of Christmas is always under constant threat. More and more academics articulately reject the birth of Christ in a lowly stable and find the claim of a virgin mother and an immaculate conception harder to stomach than a sleigh riding, North Pole domiciled, deliverer of gifts to millions of waiting kids, overnight.

They offer up Jesus as simply a prophesier and a good man who brought a message of love and reconciliation, which they find easier to swallow than Jonah was for the whale. However it’s unlikely that 2000 years on we would consistently remember merely a good man.

And the world around us changes. The Apostle Paul’s miraculous conversion took place on the road to Damascus. Today he would likely be caught in the crossfire of troops loyal to Bashar al Assad and the rebels opposing his regime.

Fundamentalist Islamic revolutionaries dream of a world without Christians and by destroying them, and themselves in the process, believe a paradise awash with virgins beckons.

I suspect both Christ and Mohammed would weep at the misinterpretation of their teachings.

Despite these diversions the Christmas story still endures. Locally the churches will be gearing up for the usual influx as many choose to attend just once or twice a year. Humourists point to C of E being an acronym for Christmas and Easter, the only time many Anglicans make the pilgrimage, rather than Church of England.

Contrary to popular belief church regular attendance may not be on the wane. Arguably Masterton’s most imposing church is the newly-built Lighthouse facility in Intermediate Street and St. Andrews at Upper Plain recently celebrated the opening of a brand new hall for their junior congregation. This indicates the churches are still popular as places of worship, although many people now use secular facilities for funerals and prefer to conduct weddings in restaurants or garden settings with non-religious vows led by celebrants rather than clergy. Few women want to honour and obey their menfolk.

The church’s influence on our lives however cannot be brushed aside. Christ gave the world its calendar and our two greatest holidays, Christmas and Easter, marking His birth and His resurrection. His teachings gave us the doctrine of marriage and aroused men to abolish slavery, create orphanages, homes for the blind, the first hospitals, and the first schools. History shows that nations of the past rose and fell according to their beliefs in His teachings. Rome under Constantine, England under Alfred the Great and Queen Elizabeth the First and Queen Victoria and the United States under their Christian forefathers.

Christ inspired the world’s greatest art and music such as Michelangelo’s Pieta and Handel’s Messiah. Our doctrines of right and wrong, the morals of life, are based on His utterances. No other human being has changed so many sceptics into peace-filled believers, offered so much hope to the mentally disturbed, the physically ailing, and the spiritually lost.

The centurion at the foot of the cross said it all: “Surely this man was the Son of God.”

Have a great Christmas!

(First published on the 19th of December 2012)
 

“How many observe Christ’s birthday! How few, his precepts! O! ‘tis easier to keep holidays than commandments.” - Benjamin Franklin

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Food Banks needed because of unchecked inflation

I attended a committee meeting of the Masterton Food Bank this week and there was good news and bad news. The good news was that there are many generous individuals and businesses that add value to the Food Bank coffers on a regular basis allowing the good people that voluntarily operate the facility to buy-in and access lots of food and other household items of necessity to fill their constantly depleted shelves.

The bad news is that demand for the services is increasing exponentially.

I tried to think why in a country that should be prospering; the constant demand for food parcels for families is an ever-increasing problem.

I might have at least part of the answer. I happened upon an advertisement for our butchers shop back from 1990. Legs of lamb were $13.95 each, a leg of mutton was $9.95 and you could buy a two kilo pack of sausages for $2.95. Sausages in a smaller pack were $1.95 a kilo.

Some explanation. “Mutton” was in fact ewe mutton. The government meat inspectors at the abattoirs would give it a red stripe (first quality) if it had good conformation. We would buy around 200 ewes a week and the best 100 of these we would set aside to make into cuts and joints for retail sale. The other 100 we would bone out and trim to create lean meat. This meat would be mixed with our beef trimmings to make beef flavoured sausages.

(We also bought in weekly about 30 lambs, around 50 hoggets, plus about 25 bodies of beef and twelve porkers.)

The legs of mutton, which were half as big again as a leg of lamb, were sold (as previously mentioned) for $9.95.

We would bone the forequarters and roll them up with seasoning, wrap them in cookable netting and market them as “colonial goose” for $5.95 each.

The loins were sold for $7.95.

There was good profit in this for us, and great buying for our customers.

I looked up our old wages book and found that our senior staff were being paid $12 an hour. Checkout operators and meat packers who were invariably of the female gender were paid between 8 and 10 dollars an hour. I Googled the minimum wage in 1990 and it was $6.12 an hour.

Fast forward to today. Average wage in New Zealand, according to Google, is $50,000 a year. This equates to around $24 an hour. So wages have doubled. Now let’s look at meat prices. A full leg of lamb will set you back $50, mutton has disappeared from the market entirely, so too has hogget which was usually mid-priced between mutton and lamb.

Beef flavoured sausages, once a staple diet for many, in my New World supermarket today were selling for $9.49 a kilo!

Do the math and you can see why so many families today are, comparatively speaking, finding it hard to make ends meat.

“One part of mankind is in prison, another is starving to death; those of us who are free and fed are not awake. What will it take to rouse us?” - Saul Bellow 

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Oh, I do like to be beside the seaside...

I wrote a letter to the Dominion-Post last week, but was disappointed to see that it was not published. I have since found out however that Patrick Crewdson, Editor in chief (I kid you not, that is his title) of Stuff will not publish anything from climate-change denialists. Another blow it seems for free speech.

Anyway here is the letter:

Dear Editor,

In a front page article in the Dominion-Post on Wednesday the 28th of November Nicholas Boyack reports that parts of Lower Hutt and Petone could be under water before the end of the century, according to a damning report.

I am reminded that back in September 1988 a 'damning report' in Wellington’s Evening Post made the same dire predictions:

“As a result of global warming, across the nation temperatures are breaking records and severe southerly storms which traditionally smashed the capital three or four times a year have become a thing of the past as Wellington bathes in year round balmy weather. Spring flowers are appearing up to two months earlier than usual, heating bills are way down, skin cancer is on the rise and numerous other changes are readily observable.”

The Evening Post author was concerned that there was universal agreement that the polar ice caps were melting which could lift sea levels from three to twelve feet. “As a result nations like the Maldives and Bangladesh would be wiped out, which in the latter case, given its huge population, raised unprecedented re-settlement and refugee problems.”

The writer thought that most of New Zealand’s concerns could be solved building sea walls, but felt that cities like Wanganui and Lower Hutt, with sizeable river outlets, may have some special difficulties.

Other towns, such as Raglan, the article went on to say, were probably doomed, being not of sufficient size and importance to justify saving.

As an occasional visitor to Wellington I must say I am blissfully unaware of the year-round balmy weather; perhaps I visit on the wrong days. Meanwhile sea walls are conspicuous by their absence and I’m fairly certain that, thirty years on, the dear hearts and gentle people of Raglan still live and love in their home town.

Not to worry, didn’t I read somewhere that Al gore recently bought a house by the sea?

Yours faithfully,

Rick Long

“Now there sits a man with an open mind. You can feel the draught from here.” - Groucho Marx. 

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