Finding our voice to ensure light always wins
much more frightening - just an ordinary young man with a grievance?
David Gray, New Zealand’s other mass shooter, killed 13 people in Aramoana in 1990. Only five years older than the Christchurch shooter, Gray was also a loner, had a stockpile of ammunition and rifles, including a semi-automatic. In the absence of the internet, Gray read military books and Soldier of Fortune magazines.
In August 2018, the secretary of the Wellington Service Rifle Association was asked how the club assessed shooters seeking its endorsement for the E-category licence, which is required in NZ for the purchase of a military style semi-automatic (MSSA). He confidently asserted that ‘‘You can pretty much tell straight away if they’re a loose unit’’. The Christchurch shooter owned two MSSAs and was a member of the Bruce Rifle Club, which found his behaviour unremarkable.
How are we to understand the rise of right-wing extremism? In Fascism: A Warning, former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright suggests that it ‘‘thrives when the perception takes hold that the media always lies, the courts are corrupt, democracy is a sham, corporations are in thrall to the devil, and only a strong hand can protect against the evil ‘other’.’’
How should we respond? In The Guardian last September Chantal Mouffe wrote that ‘‘… despising the ‘deplorables’ … the moral condemnation and demonisation of rightwing populism … merely reinforces anti-establishment feelings … The only way to fight rightwing populism is to give a progressive answer to the demands they are expressing in a xenophobic language.’’
As a society, do we share culpability? We already know that unfettered social media has the capacity to undermine democracy, disseminate and amplify hatred and distort the truth.
Facebook removed 1.5 million head-cam videos of the shootings within 24 hours of the attack, but as Carole Cadwalladr, of the Observer pointed out, a single iteration of the video was watched 23,000 times in just one hour.
Violence is everywhere served up as entertainment in film, TV and video games. A local young man who watched the live-streamed killing spree said ‘‘it looked just like a video game.’’
Inscribed on the memorial to the victims of the Aramoana shooting is an excerpt from Prayer by Kahlil Gibran: ‘‘And if it is for your comfort to pour your darkness into space, it is also for your delight to pour forth the dawning of your heart’’ evoking, in this context, the dark and light in all of us, and our capacity for acts both savage and sublime.
Many of us found ourselves praying in exactly this way fervently hoping that the mixed horror, shame and love we felt would miraculously transmute into comfort for the murdered and the wounded, their families, emergency personnel and the accidental witnesses who tried to save lives.
And says Gibran, if ‘‘you cannot but weep when your soul summons you to prayer, she should spur you again and yet again, though weeping, until you shall come laughing.’’