5 November
Guy Fawke's Day is a dumb holiday. So, in yet another incident in Europe's long-running and utterly puerile religious wars, one guy gets caught trying to blow up the English parliament, and so the government lights him on fire, and ever since then people have lit things on fire and blown things up on 5 November to celebrate this.
"Celebrate"? Celebrating a guy being burned at the stake?
Sure, he was trying to do A Bad Thing. But everybody was trying to do Bad Things to each other, and what the English government of the day did to him was another Bad Thing. Maybe we should hold off the celebrations until Europeans can agree to stop fighting each other over who follows the correct form of Christianity.
And why we continue to celebrate Guy Fawkes Day in Aotearoa is beyond me. Leave the bonfires and fireworks to England - maybe one day they'll reach a level of civilisation where they'll realise that celebrating a guy being lit on fire by the government is a bit crass.
Here in Aotearoa we have a much more important and relevant event to observe on 5 November. On 5 November 1881 the colonial government sent the armed constabulary to invade Parihaka because, obviously, pacifists practicing non-violent civil disobedience presented a huge existential threat to the colonial state. Or something like that.
What would be nice would be to see Guy Fawkes Day forgotten, relegated to some curious footnote - "Oh yeah, we used to do that, but we realised it was dumb to celebrate a stupid incident in Europe's ridiculous religious wars that has nothing to do with us".
What would be nice would be the government having an official observance of Parihaka Day in which it recognised that the invasion of Parihaka is one of many incidents in Aotearoa's history in which the government did Very Bad Things to Māori for the "crime" of being Māori and believing England would actually honour Te Tiriti.
What would be nice would be to see the government, at these official observances, acknowledge that these crimes of colonisation continued well after Aotearoa's independence and well into the twenty first century.
What would be even nicer would be electing a government that would actually do something genuine about redress, you know, actually genuinely try and fix the problems caused by our colonial history.
If only there was an election on...