OPINION
The Easter holiday weekend was most enjoyable. We have been pottering about the South Island visiting some places we haven’t been for a while. Due to my not wanting to spend money if I don’t have to, or as little as possible, our accommodation has been backpacker hostels – always a source of thrift and making new friends.
On Sunday and Monday we were in Picton: a lovely town at the tip of the South Island. There was a group of school-aged children staying there whilst competing in some sailing event and a group of boys over from Rarotonga for the event quickly became friends with my own children. As an amusing aside: their chaperone was a teacher from Spain – of all places. It appears he wasn’t particularly keen on observing normal hours for boys that age, as around nine pm he’d come out into the lounge with a handful of two dollar coins, saying, “Here boys: this is for the Coke machine,” and the resulting sugar rushes would keep them occupied until around midnight!
Anyway, it was enjoyable engaging various European travellers in conversation in the lounge area, all aged in the 18–22 range. Casual questioning drew fascinating responses on a range of topics. One thing that was universal is none of them were into ‘wokeness’ (for lack of a better term): numerous aspects of that were greeted with complete derision and a lack of respect for universities who peddle such twaddle.
Even more intriguing was the talk about upcoming general elections in the UK, Belgium, Austria and elsewhere. The issue that got almost everyone animated was immigration and their respective governments tolerating illegal immigrants. Here were 19-year-olds expressing deep concerns about the sorts of people who’ve entered their countries and the possible changes of longstanding culture and cultural norms for future generations. That they were saying they felt they had no option but to vote for right-wing parties advocating strong stances in immigration contrasts markedly with what the fake news media pretends are the views of young people.
What I also noticed happening was that when one person said something, suddenly others – often on the other side of the room – would join in and say they felt much the same. The ‘fear’ of expressing opinions, of actually saying what everyone is thinking, is alive and well, but once one person breaks through, however, everyone else is on board. The line that young people are all wokesters who engage in Mexican waves and group hugs towards miserable wretches fleeing the Third World and heading to Europe and the UK does not appear to stand up to scrutiny.
When one experiences a range of similar opinions, of completely random group of people in half-a-dozen backpacker hostels around the South Island, you can only conclude a certain trend is emerging. The left wingers and their brainwashing has failed spectacularly: the average European teenager no more thinks men can get pregnant than they think 5000 ‘military age’ Muslims are a force for advancing their society. Once again ‘we’, the good guys, are the ones who’ve won ‘hearts and minds’ – not the left wingers. It has certainly given me a glimmer of hope for the future. Just as Thatcher and Reagan started dominoes falling all over the world economically in the 1980s, perhaps Trump will do the same ‘culturally’ in the late ’20s. Maybe all it requires is one person ‘doing’ and then other leaders will fall into line and do the same.