Retrograd
Just after President Vladimir Putin’s speech acknowledging International Women’s Day, his army bombed a maternity and children’s hospital in Mariupol. Ukrainian women and children stumbled out of the rubble while the Russian army went on shamelessly insisting it wasn’t targeting civilian infrastructure.
As the world reacts to the disgusting slaughter of President Putin’s war, there’s a refrain you keep hearing: amazement that this could be happening now, to a European country in the 21st century. This was almost the first thing that struck me too: it is so utterly retrograde. Not only in its savagery, but in its complete detachment from the modern world.
We are told President Putin doesn’t regard Ukraine as a real country. He wants to recreate the Russian Empire, and is ready to bomb anyone who gets in the way. He doesn’t have a problem with threatening world security, potentially causing nuclear fall-out, using banned weapons and committing war crimes. Even if any Russians were willing to indulge him in this violent killing spree, how could they think there’s time for it now? It’s insanely anachronistic. It’s the madness of Retrograd.
You can’t get the power-crazed old leader of a petro-state to pause and think about climate change, any more than you can influence an Auckland mayoral candidate who suggests dumping the regional fuel tax that helps fund public transport projects. Try telling some people there’s a new reality. Some people will go on doing their retrograde thing, until all they’re left with is scorched earth. It makes you wonder if it’s pointless to dream of adaptation, and a different kind of world.
Recently I had two encounters that made me think of Retrograd. An old friend had a serious mental health and addiction crisis. When we went across town to visit, we found a situation so dire I felt sure help could be summoned. (Those who have experience with such crises will laugh at my naivety.) On the phone to a community addiction service, I explored the options. Could someone come to the house? No. And unless the patient had trouble breathing, an ambulance would take hours. A crisis team could attend, but only if there was a threat to self or others. There was no help; there was nothing. We buckled down and did the only thing we could: we talked and talked for hours.
Not long after that, a woman tripped over outside my gate. She’d hit her head and got a serious gash to her leg. She and I waited fifty minutes until the ambulance came. The paramedics couldn’t have been kinder. One had come up from Taranaki to help with the Omicron surge. They discussed options, where to take her in a hospital system understaffed, crowded and struggling under the strain.
A few days after these small dramas, National leader Christopher Luxon announced a brand new plan: tax cuts. He insisted these wouldn’t reduce public services (they wouldn’t target civilian infrastructure.)
It made me reflect on a familiar phenomenon. People whose outlay involves enormous houses, multiple properties, private schools and expensive cars will demand tax and rates cuts, while furiously complaining about public services. They’re scandalised by the state of our hospitals, by homelessness, by the lack of mental health services. Mention you’ve waited hours for an ambulance, or that mental health services are stretched to the limit, and they’ll be indignant. They will blame the government. Then they will briskly use the tax cut to transport the family to a holiday in Europe. This is Retrograd, where you take it all for yourself, live your best gated life, enjoy the paradise of your own scorched earth.
