Why?

I have a child. She's four. Cool kid. Four is a fun age. She's got her own little personality and views of the world. She tries to make jokes. They're terrible. We laugh along together anyway.

One of the big tropes of this age is "why?". She keeps asking why things are, and I don't have good enough answers. Because if you ask why enough times you start arriving at some pretty uncomfortable places.

For example, why do some children not have enough to eat? This isn't one she's asked. This is not one of those posts where I make up some precocious shit my child has said to make a point. She asks things like "why does Tigger jump?".

But why do some children not get enough to eat?

I guess it's because their parents don't feed them enough.

But why?

Because they can't afford to.

Why not?

Because they don't earn enough money to cover the price that we have arbitrarily set to live.

Why not?

Because they don't have a high paying job.

Why don't they?

At this point you'll probably get an ideological turning point.

Maybe they don't have a high paying job because they didn't pull themselves up by their bootstraps. They didn't work hard enough at school. They didn't do the right course at university. They are just lazy.

But why all of those things?

Even right wingers might struggle here. Unless they go full mask off and start getting racist.

And even if those things are true and fair answers (they're not), then why do children go hungry because of the sins of the parent?

Because we let them. We choose to have children go hungry. The government makes an active choice not to ensure that children are all fed.

There's more than enough food to go round, but we choose to allocate it badly. Really badly.

And I don't mean this government only. Though this government has made that choice. But every government makes this choice.

And when you stop thinking of things being left to chance and start ascribing responsibility to those why questions, shit gets grim.

Why do people commit crime?

They don't have enough money. We choose to have a subset of society exist outside the mainstream who go without. Then we punish them if they try to force their way into getting stuff.

Why are Māori over represented in negative outcomes? Because we chose racism. Because colonisation hasn't ended but we like to pretend it has so we can absolve ourselves of guilt and responsibility.

Why is our health system collapsing?

Because governments have chosen not to fund it properly.

Why is the climate changing?

Because we chose capitalism over environmentalism. Because governments chose - and continue to choose - to prioritise the profits of private companies over a habitable earth.

We need to stop pretending that things are occurring by happenstance and recognise that they are more often than not the outcomes of deliberate choices. And we must demand better. Because if we don't we'll have another question to ask.

What do we do when society collapses?