Light the fuse

Chapter 12

Liberty kitchen end to child hunger

Contents
author Cimino
work-in-progress published 20240721

I’ve seen the flame of hope among the hopeless
And that was truly the biggest heartbreak of all
That was the straw that broke me open
Bruce Cockburn, 1999

Liberty with which to End Child Hunger: In the fight to preserve liberty, or a survivable climate, the fight to end child hunger must the first to be won. Pictured is the firstfrom that particular shipyard Liberty ship to launch at the new, state-owned shipyard at Cape Fear River, North Carolina—other photographs attest to a crowd of 13 000 having attended the launch. The ss Zebulon B Vance, as the usahs John J Meany, served the latter years of World War II as a hospital ship. In addition to kitchens, modular clinics, field hospitals, housing and schools could all be manufactured in Aotearoa from locally grown engineered timber—high-cube-shipping-container-dimensioned. image East Carolina Digital Collections

Food, clothing, shelter, and something to hope for—to para­phrase Kirk. First for a few, and now for generations, since 1984 when the Labour Party set about with its secret, state-destroying agenda, increasing numbers of New Zealand children have routinely gone without food, and without hope.

At the heart of child hunger, Cimino accepts, is the appalling capitulation of a once proudly egalitarian society, to neoliberal ideology. The immense disparity in prosperity that 40 years that that odious trickledown dogma has delivered—for example, the 14-fold prosperity-score disparity between the opulent 9.8 of Ōrākei and the 0.7 of Ōtara–Papatoetoe. Hungry children can’t allowed to live in hope for another 40 years for neolibralism’s wrongs to be reversed, when, instead, the first liberty kitchens could be being prototyped and trialled, within months.

From his earliest awareness of individual dispositions, Cimino had always thought of himself as an optimist, even embracing owning the Pollyanna end of the spectrum. It is days like this, Cimino, when the day dawns clear and cold, when his Wordle start word has come up trumps, and when Biden has done the decent thing by quitting his run at re-election. Demented from day one as the president’s proposition was, Cimino prays now that the Democratic Party, 44 years after the Republicans chose a face and a voice to go with it, appreciates that it doesn’t just need to listen to George Clooney, but to nominate  him. Six decades ago, a barely inaugurated president implored:

…ask not what your country can do for you…

Would, that that shadow-of-its-former-self party, today, could imagine a great, new beginning. Although it often doesn’t feel like it, Cimino knows he’s not the only one…

‹ Chapter 8   | Appendix 1 ›

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