Give Us Your 
Articles Bringing international politics into the family home
Friday, 03 April, 2009
Sheridan Bruce
I'm a mother, nurturer and am interested in psychology, and am now taking a bigger interest in international politics with tertiary study.
From that perspective, I've started asking myself questions like, ‘what about the people’? I’m guessing I could get all the way through this course without once having to think about the suffering of our world’s ‘ordinary’ citizens. Instead I’m learning more about mainly male despots and their criminal cronies who seem to get their pleasures causing misery and suffering to millions.
I started this course thinking politics would broaden my mind after a lifetime of focusing on the personal. Sadly, all it’s done is confirm that outside my family, my community, my city and my country, for most of the world’s citizens, life is very grim – but I already knew that because it’s reported in the papers daily.
What I’m learning is this. As a general rule, the more a country has a large population and a population bulge under 30 years, the higher is the rate of infant mortality, illiteracy, unemployment, poverty, illness, mortality, crime, corruption and human rights abuses. This coincides with those countries spending vastly more on their military and armament (including nuclear capacity) than on their health and education services. Hand in hand will be a corrupt police force, a weakened or disabled judiciary and lip service (if that) paid to democracy. On top of this triangle of despair will be a smiling assassin, called either a king (or similar), a president (who once was a general) or a ‘Great Leader’.
Turning a ‘blind eye’ is the norm for those of us who are privileged enough to be able to focus on the personal. And frankly, the world’s problems seem too large to even think about let alone tackle. Besides, what can we do about it?
We get mobilized – that’s what we do. We get civic – at our children’s schools, community centres and local associations. We get political – we participate in local body and health board issues and we take it broader to national and international human rights and welfare organizations and political parties. We discuss politics at home with our children. These days, young people are less likely to vote than in the past and they’re less likely to belong to political parties. It’s our duty to change that. We read the papers, websites and national and international news channels. We inform ourselves and we talk about it, socially and at the meetings we’re going to attend, when we get mobilized. And that is just the beginning.
If the majority of the world’s citizens are being crushed because of ‘top down’ autocracy, then we the ‘ordinary’ people, living in a democratic country, have a duty to drive change from the ‘bottom up’ and make our personal point of view political.
Sheridan Bruce is a director of FRESCO, owner of Issues.co.nz. She can be contacted here.
