Monday, April 10, 2006

Lets be honest shall we?

Hattip: Stuff
"It is a bleak place, it is a place where there is not much hope, a lot of unemployment," he said. The area was so depressed that people "wanted to get off their faces".

The primary reason people in places like Porirua, Otara, Otahuhu etc "get off their faces" is because they are bored - not because they are depressed.  The underlying cause - endemic unemployment - may be the same, but it changes the strategy for tackling quite considerably.  Attributing it to depression is a way of disowning the problem - it is so much harder to tackle a nebulous mental condition and certainly the person cannot help themselves out of it.  Whereas boredom allows the person to claim the issue and claim responsibility for helping themselves out of their own rut.

It is too common in too many societies to remove responsibility from people for their actions - and the consequence of this is the removal of "hope".
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2 comments:

Gardener said...

Is this current ritual busting of tinnie houses a new income distrubition initiative for the labour Govt. That's about all it will achieve.

The prices will go up, the criminals will make more money. Is this the intention ?

Unknown said...

To be fair I'm pretty indifferent on that part of the subject. Much like bars and pokie houses, tinnie houses can be breeding places for addiction, crime and destitution. Exactly like the other two they can be sources of "good clean" entertainment when used AND run properly.

Sometimes it might just be easier to bust something for the overt vice that is known than those that are suspected. (A famous case involving parking tickets comes to mind...)