Bill Ralston searches for campaign

There’s a good argument for starting a campaign and socking it to ’em.

It’s summer, I’m on holiday, the Christmas and New Year joy is still with me and yet I’m already getting twitchy. I’ve figured out what the problem is – my levels of bile and outrage have begun to rise dramatically because I have little to vent my spleen on.

In the normal course of a working year there are thousands of petty irritations and annoyances that accumulate and culminate in a major spitting of the dummy. However, sitting idly in the sun I find I’m at peace with the world and enjoying myself too much, so septic levels of residual wrath and fury have no outlet and are backing up.

I need to find something that infuriates me and start a campaign against it. The trouble is there appears to be a campaign against virtually everything already – very worthy national and international campaigns against things like whaling, climate change, poverty and homophobia.

That last one is a Polish campaign that admirably seeks a tolerant society for people outside the “heteronorm”. The only problem with this is that few of us heteros are entirely normal and, having been shopping in Grey Lynn recently, I’m not even sure that hetero is the norm any more.

Anyway, campaigns against such things as drunk driving, smoking or plastic bags are too wholesome. It’s tempting to find a subject that’s more frivolous, but they all seem quite po-faced. There is Pinkstinks, a campaign started two years ago by twin killjoys Emma and Abi Moore, who are determined to stamp out pink toys for girls. Pinkstinks is a forlorn hope.

As anyone who has been the parent of a young girl will tell you, there is only one colour the little darling demands until somewhere around the teenage years, when she moves on to horrific gothic black. On behalf of the parents of Goths everywhere, I could start a Blackstinks campaign, but I’d be lynched in New Zealand come rugby season.

I quite liked the group that calls itself the Campaign Against Coke, presuming it was a mass movement against the vile Coke Zero, until I found out it was a Columbian organisation dedicated to fighting the evils of Bolivian marching powder. That goes against the grain because I believe if people want to stick things up their nose they should be free to do so, but having once accidentally lodged a ballpoint in my nostril, I warn you some forms of nasal ingestion aren’t that much fun.

I discovered an old news story from Indonesia about a Government-run Campaign Against Train Roof Riders that involved spraying non-paying passengers clinging to locomotives with some permanent coloured dye. I thought our Government could use it as an argument against Len Brown’s Auckland inner-city rail loop, spreading fear that building the service would only encourage heavily dyed multicoloured new immigrants to revert to traditional train-top riding here.

I could start a Campaign Against Bastards Who Mow Their Lawns Before 10am. That could become a mass movement, I’m sure. I certainly could campaign against one of my neighbours, who has a penchant for burning pungent plastics in his illegal incinerator. For the past couple of weeks I’ve attempted a retaliatory strike whenever he lights up by playing at full volume Band Aid’s revoltingly saccharine Do They Know It’s Christmas?, but he seems to enjoy it and I’ve heard a chorus or two of We Are the World coming back at me over the fence.

Now that summer is here, I could begin a Campaign Against Crocs, arguing the repellent plastic sandals are an assault on the Kiwi jandal culture and no one over the age of 10 should be allowed to wear them because they constitute a fashion atrocity. But I think most people have woken up to the fact that, along with tasseled brown leather boat shoes, they can cause social ostracism.

However, campaigns against things seem too negative. Perhaps we should consider a campaign for something that might improve our lives and even save us money.

There is a good argument for a Campaign for Odd Socks. I suspect, like me, you find your washing machine has the weird habit of disappearing one of every pair of your socks and eventually you end up with a basketful of odd socks. Where is it written that the left sock has to match the right one? Why can’t we wear a different-coloured sock on each foot without people telling us we are mismatched? In 2012, I will delve into the odd-sock basket and start wearing them; for example, a red one on the left, and a striped blue one on the right.

It will give me a cause, it’ll save me a fortune, and at least I won’t be sporting bloody Crocs.