A war-weary guide to what

Sure, Christmas is nice, but as a kid I preferred the low-key excitement of stationery day – that day in January when mum took us to buy two-ring binders, set squares and 2B pencils for the school year ahead. Nerdy, yes, but there was the whiff of promise in the blank pages of those 1B4 exercise books; the moment where you could say, this year will be better, my marks will be better. I’ll be better.

This was a pure form of optimism; a faith in the possibilities that stretched ahead like slick new pavers before they’re stomped on by muddy boots.

That’s usually how I feel around this time in January. Usually. But not this year.

Cast your mind back 12 traumatic months to the end of 2020, which hadn’t itself been one of the greats. Aotearoa New Zealand had managed the pandemic better than most, however. We were looking ahead to an effective vaccine, developed, tested and approved in less than 12 months. Covid 1.0 looked manageable. There was reason for optimism.

Indeed, many New Zealanders had high hopes for 2021. An early-January Horizon poll showed a third of us felt life would improve in the coming 12 months.

Twelve harrowing months later, The Daily Show wryly described 2021 as the ‘‘Least Bad Year of the Last 2 Years’’. And on December 20, Westpac’s consumer confidence figures showed we were more pessimistic about the economy, higher interest rates and the possibility of new Covid variants.

Hence, here we are, looking at 2022 with deep suspicion. And so, in the spirit of the battle-weary, here’s a few small things we might look forward to.

Armageddon, but done well

May as well start with the bleak stuff. The Netflix scifi (sci-fact?) movie Don’t Look Up has a very dramatic premise: a PhD astronomy student discovers a huge comet heading straight towards Earth; she and her professor try to warn the world that without action, the end of everything is just months away.

I highly recommend this film, but you might find

Barbara Walter calls ‘‘anocracy’’.

Walter advocates better civics in schools and policies that benefit the majority of citizens. US problems with statecontrolled electoral laws are not echoed here: We have stricter controls on money in elections and our MMP system has delivered more choice and renewed trust.

However, as shown by recent street protests citing a range of discredited reasons for preferring personal freedom over the common good, the need is not so much for ‘‘better civics’’ but compulsory civics made interesting and relevant. Not just in schools but at every level of institutional society, including immigrant education.

As shown by the 2014 documentary Ivory Tower, leaving US civics to increasingly unaffordable higher education could explain not only anocracy in a social media-dominated society, but also the lack of policies addressing wealth inequities. And why critical thinking skills are needed at every level. When is our Finland-equivalent programme to be implemented?