If we treated Waitangi Day with the same respect as ANZAC Day, we’d see serried ranks of our best troops line up, and tens of thousands attend somber services.
If we treated Waitangi Day like ANZAC Day, we’d have great stone memorials in every village and town and city dedicated to our honourable dead – from every side – and town dignitaries would place wreaths and swear solemn oaths that the New Zealand wars would never happen again and swear it would all be put right.
If we treated Waitangi Day like ANZAC Day, every town would have a state-built Waitangi Memorial Hall.
If we treated Waitangi Day like ANZAC Day, students from Year 7 up get prizes and scholarships and free trips overseas for opining in essays and speeches about the Treaty of Waitangi.
If we treated Waitangi Day like ANZAC Day, all the newspapers and tv stations and the news would lay it on thick for weeks beforehand with films and documentaries about heroic Maori and European actions right here.
If we treated Waitangi Day like ANZAC Day, anyone who criticized or mocked it would be told they were traitors to New Zealand.
Like ANZAC Day gets treated now.
Is ANZAC Day more serious, more worthy of funding, more ‘nation-building’, than Waitangi Day?
Powered by WPtouch Mobile Suite for WordPress