Ring of (un)Truth

I have to admire Ken Ring.
For all the hedging of bets such as predicting after-shocks in Christchurch virtually every second day amidst a swarm of such shocks he is at least willing to go out on a limb and predict a “big one” on one day: March 20. I understand from last night’s Campbell Live that he now denies making that prediction, but unfortunately for Ken it was literally recorded and it is here: http://www.radiolive.co.nz/Ken-Ring-predicted-Chch-Earthquake-and-the-current-terrible-weather/tabid/506/articleID/16322/Default.aspx from Marcus Lush’s Radio Live show.
So, I submit, Mr Ring’s credibility hangs on that day or, to give him a little latitude, a couple of days either side. Or does it? I earnestly hope for the people of Christchurch that he is wrong. But I’ll go out on the same limb he is hanging on so tenaciously and say he will be wrong. And I say that because of other circumstances and proclamations that suggest to me Mr Ring is nothing but a charlatan. For example:
1. His claim that dolphins beam sonar signals to the moon. Why? Is there someone there to hear them?
2. His claim that New Zealand is half the size of Australia, but most of it is under the sea. Well, that puts a new perspective on the foreshore and seabed debate.
3. He is the co-author of a book on how to read a cat’s paws. Pawmistry: How To Read Your Cat’s Paws. It’s interesting that Mr Ring no longer includes that book on his website in a list of his publications
4. Among his many self-proclaimed assets and abilities he claims to be a mind reader—you wouldn’t want to read mine Ken.
5. His previous careers as a clown and magician.
6. If he is that good, why didn’t he predict the (much larger) earthquake in Japan?
Ken Ring has his believers. You may well be one. Fair enough. But I am not one of them. I place no credence on his predictions and even less on his plaintive proclamations that he is not scare-mongering or promoting his myriad of books.
If I am proved wrong on Sunday March 20 my being wrong will be superseded by a far far larger tragedy. But I don’t think I will be.


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Our Broken City

In my youth I was a fan of the occult and thriller writer Dennis Wheatley. I remember little of his books now but one line from them lives on in my memory and at times gives me succour. It is: “It is God’s gift that there is no pain beyond a body’s ability to endure.”
My belief in that dictum took a severe hammering this week as I listened to the wretched stories of those who survived the cataclysm, and those who cling fiercely and bravely to the belief they are (still) on a rescue mission.
Nature raped that city. My old city. I worked in the Press building.
But it is the human tragedy and the human stories that defy belief. It is not for me the scale of that event. As damaging as it was for the community the city and the country, we can at least share that, deal with that with compassion, with strength and with a country united.
What we cannot share, what no level of compassion could hope to overcome, are moments. Moments and memories of horror and terror which so many people ill equipped to deal with them endured and will have to endure.
People like you and me.
I cannot conceive of what was it was like to be in the midst of those moments that Tuesday—one minute pounding away at a computer, next buried under tonnes of rubble listening to the harrowing screams of the dying in the darkness. I cannot conceive because you are a secretary, a reporter, an accounts clerk—you are not an off-the-shelf victim or some extra in a bloody Hollywood disaster movie.
All you are is someone who that day expected to go home at the end of the day.
Like me.
That is the human tragedy of the Christchurch Earthquake (and, yes, let’s make it a proper noun): that you are one of us.
But unlike us, Nature, and whatever or Whomever we feel controls Nature— inflicted upon you a dreadful pain beyond capacity to endure.
As Australian Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd so prosaically but perfectly put it…
“It’s just not fair.”

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Kaiapoi

In my innocent years—all eleven of them before lust visited—I had a healthy respect for authority. Authority meant my parents, my teachers, Community Constable Jack Highstead and everybody over the age of 12. Of course I was brought up in Kaiapoi where innocence and respect were the norms and a rebellious streak in me meant I soon lost mine. But Kaiapoi never did. It retained its innocence and its naïveté through decades and generations. People who were conceived there stayed there, made love there, married there, had children there, and not necessarily in that order. Generations of families attended old schools there—and even, nowadays, the brash “new” secondary school. Employment was mostly mundane—Kaiapoi is not exactly replete with hit men and theatrical types—and a man could rise to prominence as a pharmacist. That was Kaiapoi’s charm and its innocence, but almost fifty years after I lost mine, it lost its. The earthquake of September 4 destroyed literally and figuratively much of what Kaiapoi stood for. Ironically it wasn’t the epicentre of the quake but it was the centre of devastation and the people of Kaiapoi have a right to be aggrieved at the unfairness of it all. I am told that many of them are still in shock and the television pictures don’t do justice to the injustice. But if Kaiapoi has lost its innocence and temporarily its charm, it has not lost its resilience. The people of Kaiapoi are bouncing back already, determined to rebuild their town and their lives. And if Kaiapoi is now to be forever remembered for its quake rather than its woollen mills, I hope it will also be remembered as the little town that rocked, then came back.

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