A Note on Politics

I am haunted by the possibility of a society of free people. Perhaps that dream has always obsessed the minds of the citizens of small countries, from the Greeks onwards. I notice that colonies think back to the Greeks, when page 414 they begin to found, however roughly, what they hope will be a new nation. Above the River here, Atene, where there is not even the ghost of a village, means Athens; Koroniti, where one old man still lives in the pa, means Corinth; Ranana, where the road bears asphalt for a short distance, and there is a school, a church and a hall, means London; Jerusalem is Jerusalem, or in the Maori tongue, Hiruharama. The dreams of the colonists were grandiose. They hoped for a change in the human condition. I do not quite hope for that. I hope only that in my lifetime a majority of this affluent culture will set aside their iron-hard determination to become twice as affluent, and make the first clumsy moves towards a practical understanding of freedom. Freedom implies community; without community, the relationships which constitute human freedom cannot be established. That at least I have learnt already.

Why be free? Because your choices must be free if you are to love anybody or anything. Love is what one chooses to be and do. On the face of it, one is equally free to become demoralised; but I think demoralisation always [implies?] in its beginnings an abdication of choice, a fixed notion that God or Faith or other people have already determined one’s choice before one makes it.

I recall a young man I knew in Auckland, He was known to the drug-pushers. His sporadic trades did not make him rich. One day I was going up the street by the Babel Café, and met him coming down. I had no money.

‘Ray,’ I said, ‘can you give me ten cents for a glass of milk?’

‘Any time,’ he said cheerfully. He fished in his pocket and extracted the one coin he possessed, a twenty-cent piece. He gave it to me, and proceeded on his way, travelling lightly on the balls of his feet, with his head held high. He was still a free man.

On occasions the police would approach him in the park and offer him twenty dollars in hand for information about his drug-using friends. He would laugh at them. Once or twice they took him down to the station and hammered him for other information. He cursed them, gave no information, and continued to travel the difficult private road of freedom.

But my drug-pushing friend decided to reform. This was the beginning of his demoralisation. He took over a small restaurant and waited for loyal customers. One day I approached him at the bar of his restaurant. I told him I was writing an article about the Auckland fuzz, and would appreciate some information about the times the fuzz had banged his head into the wall.

His look became curiously guarded. He looked to left and right. Then he said, ‘I’ve got no information to give you. I have got no quarrel with the police . . .’.

He was afraid that the police might jail the [clients?] and break up the restaurant trade. What the pain of physical violence had been unable to do page 415 the fear of the loss of natural security had finally done. His courage had been bent. . . .

I was sorry to lose a friend. When courage departs, friendship is the next casualty. . . .

I am not in favour of drug-pushing as a way of earning a living, But when he was a drug-pusher his image was his one certain spiritual assert. It made him a free man. [When he opened the restaurant] his courage dried away . . . My heart was full of grief to see this happen.

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