A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.
Opinion
Well Clive, let me first inform you that I have been writing letters in various editor's columns for at least 60 years or more, and this is one of the most open and accessible columns I have penned in.
I have followed a lot of your letters with interest. I
agreed with some and disagreed with some. That is how it should be, for when two people agree on everything it shows that only one is doing the thinking.
It is easy to develop a “siege mentality” when we encounter many detractors to our writing, especially when so many of them are suffering by being arm-chair critics, guilty of old conditioned thinking only. Jeremy may from time to time oppose our points of view, yet in some cases there is no opposition when we make the same points, perhaps more precisely. When the editor does not uphold some of our points, we must persist in expressing our points of view but without taking “rejection” personally. We should continue to “play the ball, not the man” which is an old Kiwi adage.
In the case of our points of view, I would suggest that you seek out the two Stuff videos which actually show that the spraying of police was not with acid, but accidently by a policeman using his pepper spray. I would also ask you to view another Stuff video on YouTube, which clearly shows a uniformed police sergeant twice breaching his own line and throwing punches at the heads of protesters who were not acting violently, then further down the same line, punching and eye-gouging an elderly man who has been offering no violence but has been backed up against a portaloo. These videos have been viewed over 100,000 times.
If you are anything like your late father, who was a mentor to me in my school years, I know you to be a fair man, and although these videos may not change your mind on the substantive issues, they may modify your thinking to some extent.
