Cass Avery: Ordinary people of world want hope for peaceful future

For the first 10 years of my life I thought the future was going to be like the centrefolds in the National Geographic with space stations that shone in the full blaze of our sun like human greenhouses, circling Earth - not just one space station but many.

They had corridors of traffic modules and skyscrapers of apartments, pavilions of shops and lots of greenery huffing out precious oxygen. They were brilliant stars of human genius, shining on the edge of our known world. I believed it all.

But thousands of people a day starved to death while white coats pushed billions of dollars into rockets that burped on the launch pad and fell over. And what is more inglorious to a national frontier psyche than a rocket that falls off the radar in a dribble of smoke?

Then the prospect of a nuclear winter extinguished the light that space age technology had held aloft since the late 60s.

Every school had copies circulating of the Raymond Briggs comic book When The Wind Blows about the elderly couple who died slowly after the bomb. There were American TV movies about the nuclear holocaust, there was Logan's Run and the moment in Planet of the Apes when we saw the Statue of Liberty emerging from a sandy coast. The mushroom cloud was as universally recognisable as Coca-Cola.

People talked about a darkness that would block out the sun for hundreds of years. And in New Zealand we had the added fear that we might live.

So all in all, the 70s and 80s kids grew up on a weird diet of science-fiction nonsense and extreme fatalism.

I'm not for one minute saying that was worse than the World Wars or the Depression - there is no point-scoring going on here.

What I am saying is that I grew up believing that my world would be whisked away either in a nuclear blast or by a space future where none of the present rules necessarily applied.

And I believe it shaped the way I thought about governments and authority figures and the value of the lives laid out for us by our elders.

In the face of these strange and horrible tomorrows I find the egocentrism of my generation entirely rational. We were being asked to invest our lives in a social system that lacked credibility because it seemed hell bent on throwing our future out the window. And it is happening again.

President Bush is determined to enter into full-scale armed conflict with Iraq demanding individual human beings throw themselves like tin soldiers into the sun until at some economically, fiscally, or populist turn, the whole circus will be wound up and the dusty road home will be travelled by the crumpled wagons.

I cannot begin to communicate how extraordinary this is to me - that the modern world would commit people, with daily, dull and ordinary lives, into a one-on-one conflict to resolve an issue that is transparently politically expedient and noble only in rhetoric.

The idea that some guy who has been to secondary school in Mt Roskill, gets a night job stocking shelves at New World, then gets his certificate and starts working as a plumber, always takes over the barbecue at friends' parties, wears the animal slippers his daughter gave him, hires a mate to help out with his plumbing business and hates beetroot, the thought of that guy, being hauled off to a war in the Middle East is a piece of madness.

And with the prospect of this unfolding for Americans, Australians and possibly New Zealanders, why are we not all marching in the streets daily in protest?

In 1984 Frankie Goes To Hollywood was singing "War has shattered many young men's dreams, we've got no place for it today, they say we must fight to keep our freedom, but Lord, there's just got to be a better way".

It amazes me to think that was already nearly 20 years ago. And here we are. On the brink of another war.

Maybe we don't believe it will happen because so many other futures have come to nothing. The space stations look old school and laughable now in their National Geographic fold-outs and the mushroom cloud has worn out its fear factor.

It was all so extraordinary, so powerfully life changing, so threatening, but it was just ether. And now it takes an exceptional scenario to distract me from my worn-out sense of wow.

The empty streets suggest other people share this fatigue of extreme scenarios.

The prospect of war in the Middle East is horrifying because it is an unnecessary evil. Everything about it is wrong. Ordinary people are being lined up in the wings of the theatre of war yet I still don't quite believe it will happen.

I have been raised on American follies and they don't emotionally connect to me any more. And I really, really crave something worthwhile to look forward to.

Herald feature: War with Iraq