Jim Hopkins: Stop infecting youngsters with misery

We don't need to worry as much as we do. Photo / Supplied

This will never do. It's an outrage. These people must be bonkers. How dare they prefer this ravaged wasteland.

They clearly know nothing of our polluted rivers and pooh-filled paddocks, not to mention the Treaty breaches and similar horrible horrors we clasp so close to our masochistic bosom.

Obviously no one's told them of the shame that spews from our parish pump. Because these blighters want to come here - in droves, no less. Or so a recent and exhaustive Gallup poll would suggest.

Having quizzed oodles of folk in 148 countries, the poll concluded there are millions of people all around the world who don't want to live where they are but would very happily live where we are.

We're in Gallup's top three, for heaven's sake, widely regarded as the land of milk and money, more popular than places like Sierra Leone and Haiti. Mind you, that was before Wednesday's earthquake in Whanganui - which may have changed a few foreign minds and, quite possibly, fingers crossed, even dislodged the alien "h".

But earthquakes aside, it's clear we must act, before the floodgates open and a human tide of optimistic immigrants (8 million all up if we let everyone in) pours across our borders. There's no time to waste. It may have started already.

This nine-day, 100km traffic jam in China could be entirely composed of enthusiastic souls desperate to finish the paperwork so they can come over here, get a job, build a house and buy a farm.

That is something which cannot be allowed. The notion of more people, new businesses, innovative products, extra jobs, increased exports, higher demand, stronger retail sales, more building, bigger GDP, is unspeakable. We don't want more people - even if they want us. They must be disabused of their desire to move.

To that end, a crack unit of hand-wringing woe-mongers should be dispatched forthwith to re-educate all who would make Outer Roa their own.

"You don't want to come here," they must be told. "You won't enjoy it. No one does. Heather's not happy and neither are we.

"Everyone's down under here. We don't do cheerful, you see. Gloom with a view, that's us. If you don't want to catch whine flu, best you stay right where you are."

Yes, all right, that's an overstatement. But an overstatement for a reason. We are a glum lot, much given to the morbid contemplation of our own navel. We pay too much heed in this insular bailiwick to the assorted wowsers, worrywarts, doom-sayers and apocalyptics endlessly predicting dire calamities.

We should listen less to them and more to the world. The fact that everyone wants to come here, the fact that we're top of the migration pops, should put a smile on our dial.

We don't need to worry as much as we do. But we do need to stop infecting young people with our needless and toxic misery. Consider these two articles, published locally within days of the world giving us the thumbs up.

Both are written by teenagers and both are typical of pieces appearing regularly in newspaper youth pages. By rights, kids should be cock-a-hoop, carefree optimists, Alas no, not when they've endured years of boomer brainwashing.

"Our planet's ability to support us is crumbling at our own hands, and the lives of billions swing precariously in the balance," writes one. "Yet along we speed, clinging grimly to the economic train of progress as the railway tracks rapidly run out beneath us."

Except they're not, of course. They're taking this cruelly tutored youngster to a world of awesome possibilities. Unless, of course, climate change rears its ugly head - as the author has been convinced it will.

"Even the most conservative estimates put the extinction rate of the Earth's species at 50 per cent by 2050." (No, they don't and whoever fed you that crapulous nonsense should themselves be rendered extinct.)

"Scientists are telling us if we want to give ourselves even a 50 per cent chance of avoiding catastrophic, runaway global climate change, we need to stabilise global emissions by 2015."

We're spending billions to fill kids' heads with this claptrap, folks. Scientists are telling us nothing of the sort.

What we have here is the dogma of the pedagogues which has contaminated the second young author as well.

"The seeds of extinction for humanity have already been sown ... we are creating a wasteland, a world entangled with weeds whose stems steal away the natural treasury of the planet ... We must eradicate these fruitless weeds which infect the abused Earth if we are to save our biosystem and ourselves."

The people peddling and fostering such disabling pessimism should be ashamed of themselves. It's wicked. It isn't education, it's propaganda. Those dispensing it should go on strike forever - or be required to move to Sierra Leone. That way, we may get an equal number of honourable optimists in their place.