My Presence Alone is Worth More than the Presents Under Your Tree.

Let the bodies hit the floor.

So impressed with the shiny coat the universe is putting on the summer so far. All I need now is a few more months of this so that by the time I learn how to go back outside, the glossy shine won't have disappeared. As Marvin Gaye said, I've been really tryin', baby.

It is commonly said that politics is the art of compromise. This is wrong. As HST said himself, politics is the art of controlling your environment. I think compromise is for the weak politician; the one who needs to ingratiate and soothe the egos of those around him or her in order to have a semblance of control. If you are a charismatic leader, if you have the right message and the balls to follow through on your principles and morals, and if you aren't afraid to tell the Truth, you can control your environment. It ain't easy, but neither is compromise. Would you rather sell-out and win, or stick to the plan and make a difference? Change comes from the grass-roots, so don't be afraid to have a crack.

Not that I'm about to rush out and campaign myself anytime soon. What they don't tell you about politics is that it's filled to the brim with weaklings: pathetic humans with little scope for improving themselves or the lives of their constituents. I'm not about to become another spoke in the wheel of corruption that is Politics. Oh, my activism will come through the keys. But right now it is not important. There is enough to worry about without adding my addendum to the Book of Wrong Doing that is New Zealand politics - local or larger. I'm sure you'd rather taste the rare sugar of my optimism than the piled up salt of my pessimism.

So throw me a bone here, doves. Tell me how to improve the scope of my own self-esteem, my own self-worth, my own spiritual fortune. And don't mention the Almighty. He and I have our own correspondence that doesn't need the input of organised religion. In fact, scratch that completely! I have the key to the door of enlightenment, and on the bottle it proudly tells us that 89.9% is all you need to turn the knob. There's a Green Fairy on the other side, and she knows how to warp the corners of my perception enough to tell there's nothing over there that I haven't seen here already.

And how about you, little ones? Have you had the time of your life today? Why is it that we never catalogue our best days, so we can at least read over them on our worst ones? Are we so short-sighted? True to the form of all who have gone before me, I can say emphatically that the answer is yes. For all our intelligence, we are notoriously bad at looking ahead. We invented time, but we have no respect for it. We worship those gone before, but we damn the ones to come with our inability to take stock of situations, make intelligent decisions (using our ability to understand that every action has a consequence) and then move forward cautiously. We're quick to say that we're more intelligent than animals, but slow to admit that we act with a staggeringly large amount more buffoonery than most creatures could ever muster on their stupidest day. Tell me how that makes us so special?

But we're getting a little deep now. I propose we go back to Darwin's Theory. Natural Selection is a much fairer political system than democracy or communism or anarchy or anything else. It has no flaws, probably because it isn't invented by humans. If we re-embrace it, I won't ever have to feel that campaigning for power might be an option, and neither will anyone. Either you'll already be controlling your environment, or you'll be a memory. How good is that?

What's more impressive: Beethoven's music, or the song of a small bird?