Light the fuse

Chapter 3

Child hunger ends here, now

Beyond-Urgent for Times to be a-Changin’ : Style, in 1963, rather than substance, was changing. Now, with the state dismembered and powerless when it is needed most, the times need to change meaningfully, beyond urgently. image Columbia Records

Contents
author Cimino
work-in-progress published 20240714

Your children are so hungry
That they don’t know how to smile
Bob Dylan, 1962

Listening to his youngest, ‘waiting house’ roommate crying himself to sleep broke Cimino’s heart. The boy was more than 500 kilometres from his East Coast hill country sheep station home. His mother could not have had the slightest notion of the privations visited on her lovingly nurtured son.

In the intervening 60 years, Cimino knew how privileged his life had been, having only seen or felt the misery of hunger one other time. A four-week 1970s hunger strike to drum up funding for the Fri, in comparison, was a hoot. Fifty years on, fundraising is ripe for revelation on the magnitude achieved by Telethon. Conceived to launch New Zealand’s second, state-owned television channel, it brilliantly demonstrated how viewers could be motivated to address social serial infrastructure underfunding. St John Ambulance immediately benefited to the tune of $0.5 million, and at Telethon’s 1981 peak it raised the equivalent of 126 million, in today’s New Zealand dollars.

Moonbeams Moonshot was Cimino’s 2023 best current thinking for the name of a game-changing, public-good campaign-management platform that he and other had been working on. Determined to try again, between Mahurangi Regattas, the moral imperative—Climate Polycrisis or no Climate Polycrisis—to end child hunger, now, Cimino resolutely holds, must be New Zealand’s first priority. The six-century-old charity begins at home phrase, or variants of it, not to mention similar sentiment stretching back to the Bible, suggests that any other starting-point cause risks not being universally embraced.

Prototyping a modular liberty kitchento coin a term, echoing the heroic Liberty ship that plays to New Zealand’s strengths, Cimino slowly realises, could tick a compelling number of boxes. Targeting child-growthe.g.: Manukau City increase of 25,500 children by 2026, 22% of population hotspotse.g.: Manukau City increase of 25,500 children by 2026, 22% of population liberty kitchens would be a tangible, highly visible presence, signalling that, there, children don’t begin and end the school day too hungry to smile. With manufacturing based in Manukau, locking up carbon in the form of laminated planted-forest timber, and in high-cube-shipping-container-sized modules, the kitchens would be life-savers throughout the motute reo Māori: island, or, as in this case, islands, the phlegmatic North Island and South Island, or more colourfully, Te Ika a Maui and Te Wai Pounamu, respectively and Oceania, and exported elsewhere.

Fleshing out the liberty-kitchen concept, Cimino decides, can be progressed in parallel with numerous other strands, not least of all the crucial Moonbeams Moonshot platform, which he sees as the ultimate means of demonstrating practical, rather than representative, democracy—the tool all the more powerful for its embedded, meaningful, democratic mechanisms. Meantime, he needs to create a roadmap, by sketching out sufficient of Light the Fuse: Not the Great New Zealand Novel , to—amongst other urgencies—stand a fighting chance of a attracting the much-needed face.

Cimino also decides that, at age 77, he’ll risk his proto-modello coming off as quirky and not  attempt to change his stilted writing style, nor apologise for it—but nor does that preclude the the , following style explanation.

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