The milk of human kindness

Rosemary McLeod writes that she knows of people who left Wellington after they learned of the impact a major earthquake would have on the city.

People I knew left town when they joined Civil Defence and learned how bad things would be after a bad earthquake.

Being logical, they moved to Auckland to live among volcanoes.

I wouldn't get involved in Civil Defence.

I prefer magical thinking, which goes if I don't worry about nasty things that could happen they won't, and also ignorance is bliss.

In any case, I'm not a joiner.

I'd rather watch other insects from a distance, on the basis that if I get too close they're bound to bite.

I'm currently left wondering just what Wellington's Civil Defence will do now that we're warned its centres in the community - usually schools - won't be providing supplies when the Big One hits, and will become "communication gathering points" instead.

Presumably this means that you can gather, be their guest, but bring your own bandages and baked beans.

And I should add toilet paper to the list.

People will tear each other's throats out to get at that when the Big One comes.

The call for do-it-yourself disaster care follows a clean-out of former supply centres and a new idea, that people should look after themselves and watch out for their neighbours, not because they might be stealing your stash, but because they might be buried under their own.

Good luck with believing the milk of human kindness will flow copiously in a disaster.

To date I've never seen it happen, and I've been around longer than last week.

The decision smacks of the rightist political philosophy of laissez-faire that brought us the hilarious trickle-down theory, the model whereby the obscenely rich provide work for the obscenely destitute, and everyone in between fights it out for survival.

Like hell the rich will trickle.

Their kids even think they should get off beating up policewomen.

No, when disaster strikes the rich will guard their wine cellars with guns.

We'll have to sneak up on them.

Maybe my ancestor was right, in 1855, when an 8.2 earthquake hit Wellington.

He got his family on to a ship to beat it out of here, but the ship couldn't get out of the harbour, and turned back.

We might have ended up somewhere like Australia, where people know how to fend off disasters - oh, like desperate refugees beating at the door.

Watch my lips, I said, when Danielle Hayes won New Zealand's Next Top Model in 2010, they'll give her hell on the streets. And so it was.

Danielle came through the ranks of hopefuls as an outsider, striking and unusual looking rather than pretty, sullen rather than gushing, aloof from the other insects, who would have bitten her if they could.

I liked her, of course, and wanted her to win.

But I knew what would happen.

"I was abused on the street," Danielle now says. "People threw cigarettes and bottles at me. Mum and Dad got hate mail too. I stayed away from New Zealand until it died down, then went home to Kawerau."

Where, I suspect, many people still seethe with envy; after all, other kids used to call her ugly.

People who never get off their butts always seethe over success in anyone they know.

They think it should fall into their laps, that all it takes is to hang around looking cool.

Effort is something they don't get; risk they're averse to; but boy can they do envy, and let them envy this: Danielle lives in Paris, and they don't, and she's about to be in a movie with Scarlett Johansson.

I'm envious. Who wouldn't be?

People can be a pain, even when they send you mail.

Since giving to one charity I've been badgered with begging letters for more money, which has shut me down totally.

My aunt left a house to them. I'm off the hook.

Besides, I have donor fatigue; too many good causes want my money, all of them worthy.

I'm not surprised about the 87-year-old woman with dementia from Kaiaua, south of Auckland, who has become distressed by such endless calls for donations from people and agencies she's never met.

She mistook begging letters from charities for unpaid bills, and the more she paid the more they begged.

"This charity business has really pushed Mum off the edge," her daughter says.

"The dementia was creeping up, but it has become horrible now."

Which puts me in mind of the vast black holes in space that Chinese and American astronomers have just described, which gulp down stars.

There is a human equivalent.