People stifled by civilisation and regulation.

NZ based grandchildren open Christmas presents. 

The family gather.

Christmas Day...
We spent most of Christmas Day running our twenty fifth community Christmas Day dinner. You can read the local paper's report on that. It was at one stage VERY stressful. Somehow the people who cook the meat started the process very late so the meat was over three quarters of an hour late. We were lucky in that we had some good singers who entertained the gathered throng. The firemen did a massive job in cutting the meat at super fast speed. They cut in my office and people relayed it up to where we were dishing out the food. When we had cleaned up sufficiently and I had delivered borrowed tables to their owners we finally got home late afternoon to spend some time with the family. It felt like every muscle in my body hurt.
Toitu early settlers museum.
Today with our son and his family we visited the Toitu early settlers museum. We will visit again when we have more time. It was an interesting experience. I was so impressed with the resilience, drive and basic ability to set up home and survive in a new, unforgiving environment. They built houses out of material available. They made vehicles and machinery out of bits and peices. They modified existing vehicles to suit different situations. They invented gadgets. As I looked at the model of a settlers house I thought "You would be shot making that today!" But that got me thinking and asking questions. A poor man today wanting to add a wall to his house would not get passed the permit! The permit to do it would cost him heaps. He would have to employ a registered carpenter to do work he could do and would have to use expensive materials. He may have dreams, initiative and abilities but regulations and bureaucratic bullshit stifle him. The local by-laws keep him down. Again a poor man cannot keep his old car going. Because one or two rust buckets of cars got squashed in accidents with bigger vehicles, old cars have trouble getting warrants of fitness. Any signs of rust and it gets expensive. It annoys me too. My son and I once worked for months on an old car when he was a teenager. It was a great exercise in learning about vehicles, as well as father and son communication. We had to get it OK'd by the Land Transport Act authorities. It had small pock mark blemishes in a few places on the windscreen  and a couple of inconsequential spots of rust.  It would cost more than the car was worth to repair these. (People have hanging dice, rev counters, GPS screens all blocking their windscreen view more than these little weld indentations - it had passed a warrant test at the garage.) They declared also that they would have to strip and check the brake system, which would cost us heaps.  Sadly all our work was wasted... this perfectly good functioning little car had to be scrapped! The Land Transport Authority has representatives with a vested interest in making you buy more expensive vehicles. 
Anyway, I just think in todays world, the spirit of our early settlers, their initiative, their inventiveness and resilience is being squashed by the mad bureaucracy that surrounds us. It may keep us safer, but it kills the "spirit".