30 Jul

The Rage Inside

Published by MacDoctor on July 30th, 2009
14 Comments »

Forget smacking. If you want to understand the real causes of child and spousal abuse, look no further than the murder manslaughter of Jasmatbhai Patel, the 78 year old beaten to death by 28-year-old Bio O’Brien for putting a minor dent in his car. This trivial accident caused O’Brien to drag Mr. Patel out of his van and proceed to beat him to death in front of a bunch of primary school kids. What kind of person beats up an old man anyway, regardless of provocation? At least O’Brien had the decency to plead guilty, although I am uncertain on what grounds this deserved the lesser charge of manslaughter. To me, it seemed an unprovoked merciless beating that was extremely likely to end in serious injury or death for Mr. Patel. And before anyone makes the comment, I do not think that it would have made any difference if Mr. O’Brien had been Maori and Mr. Patel had been Pakeha. Clearly the police see something in the case that I don’t (having only newspaper accounts to go by), and that has made them step back from a charge of murder.

Be that as it may, to dismiss this attack as just another example of ”road rage” is to lose sight of the fact that this is a highly abnormal act. It is also one that I see played out in rush hour traffic every day. While drivers may not beat each other to death, they behave in highly aggressive ways, tailgating the car in front, accelerating into a gap that a car in another lane is attempting to move into, inserting themselves dangerously into gaps in the traffic barely wide enough to contain a bulimic mouse. There is also passive/aggressive behaviour exhibited by those who sit in a lane and adjust their car speed to yours despite you indicating your desire to change lanes. And let us not forget the drivers who insist on traveling 20 kph slower than the prevailing traffic in the fast lane.

Most visitors to our country say that we are the most aggressive drivers they have seen.

You can see that same level of aggression in the way we play sport, in the way we talk to strangers, particularly those in the service industries, and in the way we comment on blogs. We can even see it in the way parliament debates every day. Our aggression is apparently out of keeping with our lifestyles. New Zealand is a relatively quiet place and our lifestyles are generally slower paced than those in the US or Asia.

I think there are two underlying reasons for this aggression.

Firstly, New Zealanders have a strong sense of entitlement. We believe, in general, that rights are more important that responsibilities and that our needs should be met by society. You can see this politically in the leftward drift of even the right-wing parties and the excessive reliance of government to “do something” (although this last is a fairly widespread phenomenon globally). You can see it in society by our desire for equality without achievement – where the lowest common denominator becomes the standard. You can see it in the drive to treat children as adults, despite the fact they cannot take responsibility for their lives, neither can they function as adults. The anti-smacking campaign, and the reductions of the age of consent and the age of voting are all part of the same misplaced attempt to make children entitled to something they have not earned nor have the experience to handle.

Entitlement invariably leads to disappointment. Not all things can be delivered on a platter. With disappointment comes resentment, and with resentment anger. An entitled society is always an angry one.

The other cause of our anger is deeper and harder to recover from. It is the loss of our sense of family and community. I am not simply talking about broken families and solo parents here, although that is certainly part of the problem. I am talking about the loss of commitment people had for each other. Husbands and wives are no longer committed to each other except in the vaguest sense of “partnership” (this extends to married couples as well as non-married ones). Community meetings are now the domain only of a vociferous few. Our love for our country seems only to extend to our rugby teams – and then only when it wins! respect for each other seems a distant memory.

Part of this is, of course, that ubiquitous sense of entitlement that makes us a nation of takers, rather than givers. But there is a deeper undercurrent of devaluation of relationships that makes us reluctant to expend the time and effort required to maintain them. This dangerous mixture of angry resentment and apathy towards relationships is the root cause of child and spousal abuse. Being continually non-specifically angry while living with demanding people with whom you have little or no relationship is a recipe for disaster. Add alcohol or some other drug to the mix and it is little wonder that we have some of the worse child abuse and spouse abuse statistics in the world.

This is exactly why child abuse is so prevalent in families with transient fathers, who are frequently state-dependent and whose relationships with mother and step-children are often extremely poor.

If we seriously want to tackle our child abuse problems, we need to wean our people off state dependency as soon as possible and engender a spirit of independence and entrepreneurship . I am not simply talking about welfare dependency here, but dependency in all areas. There are some things that only a government can do successfully, but subsidizing our lifestyles is not one of them. Although I have no philosophical axe to grind with state education and health, I think the poor state of these services should give us pause to think that maybe there are better ways to deliver them, ways that do not necessarily include government.

And there is one place that government is utterly unhelpful in – relationships. The anti-smacking law is just one illustration of a law that is trying to change our relationships – and failing miserably. When it comes to the quality of our relationships with each other, only we can help ourselves. It takes effort to make relationships work. Until we are willing to put in that effort, things will not improve for us.

I know this may sound naive, but we could work on a relationship that has been difficult until it improves. At that time we could then invite the person you can now talk to again to work on a difficult relationship (other than yours), and you can start on another (while not neglecting the first). Apparently we can maintain about 10-20 good relationships at any one time, so there is plenty of scope. I know this sounds like something from that schmaltzy movie Pay It Forward, but, hey, unless we all go viral with this, nothing is going to change.

SO, John and Rodney, your job is to dismantle all the useless bits of government, including the guys who, metaphorically, place mints on our pillows. The rest of us will be at the Love-in…

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