Title: Sport 21: Spring 1998

Publication details: Fergus Barrowman, October 1998, Wellington

Part of: Sport

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Sport 21: Spring 1998

[2] The Blamers

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[2] The Blamers

The family is out on a weekend walk in the Town Belt and Graeme, 3, skipping along singing to himself, trips over a tree root. There he is, bawling, flat on his face and knees. ‘Watch where you're going, you silly dick!’ yells Brent, 7. Mum, swallowing her irritation, adds ‘Clumsy ox’, while Dad pulls him up roughly and gives him a clip over the ear.

What the hell is going on here? It's the costly culture of bullying and blaming. Modelled to us, and by us, on the hour.

Anyway, do we always have to be up? Can we never be down, can we never fall. Can we never be be up & down, naturally, like the surface of a lake? To accept that up & down are both — well — just up and down, that suffering and falling are part of life, would be to let the country buzz again with bees and kindness.

It's hard to see ourselves when pride, the oldest story, is like a giant in the way. But we can help each other see. Kids do it well because they do it naturally, without judgement. My friend Robin, like me, has a freckled, weathered, middle-aged face. One day Jessica, 3, her granddaughter, was sitting on her knee. She reached up and took Robin's cheeks in her hands, gave them a shake & said, ‘Robin, your face is like salami.’ Which it clearly is.

‘Whenever we find ourselves violently blaming circumstances, other people, bad luck etc for our troubles and failures, then we are avenging ourselves for the pain of facts, usually facts about ourselves.’ Jung.

Are you OK, Graeme?

He says nothing. He has made a decision. And he'll never tell anyone what it is.