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I love words, and occasionally I invent one. Like "choan." A choan is a sound. You've all heard it. It's the sound a crowd makes when half of them cheer and half of them groan. I heard it constantly when I was a teacher, trying to handle a class of thirty twelve-year-olds.
"Let's go out and play softball," I'd say.
Choan.
"Okay, how about we do some art?"
Choan!
"Swimming?"
CHOAN!
Dammit, I'd think. You'd be easier to handle if you were all the same! And that's how I discovered what every politician, and corporate marketing department has known from the beginning. We are easier to handle when we are all the same.
In my classroom, maintaining thirty separate relationships for six hours a day was draining enough. Imagine what it must be like when you've got the entire population of the country to manipulate.
Okay, hold that thought while we do some maths. No, no, this is easy, stay with me here. Think of any human attribute which is easy to measure, like, for example, the height of middle-aged men in New Zealand. My favourite demographic. Now measure us all and work out our average height. About two-thirds of us will fall within a narrow band around that average height. Almost one-third of us will fall within two more bands on either side of the main bunch. These are the blokes you'd call "short" or "tall." Finally, a few of us, about five per cent, will fall even further out, beyond these second bands. These are the "very short" and "very tall" chaps.
In mathematics, this is called a "normal distribution." Let me say that again. "Normal!" Even the cold, hard, detached science of mathematics regards this immense diversity as normal. So why do we, especially our politicians and advertising agencies, have such a huge problem with it? Oh, we say we don't. We claim to celebrate the wonderful, multi-faceted, social diversity that flourishes in Aotearoa*. And, of course, we lie through our teeth.
There used to be an ad on TV where a woman enthused about her new mobile phone, saying she could be "walking along the beach and it's like I've never left the office." Ridiculous, right? Wrong. I've had friends get frustrated with me because I don't have a mobile phone. They can't get hold of me when I'm out for a coffee, or driving, or doing my shopping, or, yes, walking along the beach. To regard any of this time as private is now outside the boundaries of normal.
Twenty years ago in my classroom I had very "good" kids and very "naughty" kids and everything in between. This was considered the normal range of kiddie behaviour, and I was taught ways of managing it. Now, though, on the "naughty" side of the scale, normality has been redefined as various syndromes. And we have drugs for that.
Some friends of mine have a two-year-old daughter who is short. Their doctor suggested growth hormones. Wisely, they suggested another place he could stick his hormones. She's short, for crying out loud. Her father is short. She's going to be a short woman. Problem? Well maybe. If she's "normal," people won't point and stare, and she'll be able to buy clothes that fit.
These days it should be a cliché to protest about the ridiculously idealised female form which young girls are taught to aspire to. Except it still exists. Pop into any trendy little frock bar along Auckland's High Street, for example, and try to buy a dress for a fat girl. It can't be done. Literally, fat girls' dresses don't exist. Socially, neither do fat girls.
In the Auckland suburb where I live, there are a number of "street people." These are folk who have previously been in institutions and are now in "community care" in halfway houses. A while ago, the local free newspaper published a story about these people exhibiting threatening behaviour toward passers-by. It even supplied us with a phone number which we were urged to ring if we felt uneasy. Now, I've lived here for seven years, and I've seen those people almost every day. Not once have I ever seen anything remotely threatening. Why was I being encouraged to fear them? Then I spotted an adjoining article which laid out plans by the local business community to turn our suburb into an upmarket shopping and dining destination. Aha!
Slowly and insidiously, we are drawing in the boundaries of normality. Those left stranded on the margins become ... well ... marginalised. Voiceless and invisible. Except that as we draw the margins in ever closer, these non-people will start to outnumber us normal folk, and we'll have to start building gated communities. Real boundaries to replace the social ones. Which, of course, we're already doing.
And we'll laugh, or maybe choan, at people who pine for the days when things used to be different.
*Aotearoa = Maori name for New Zealand; Maori = indigenous people of NZ.
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