David Slack
‘Our luck ran out, and then some monster consumed by unreasoning hate seized his chance.’
It couldn’t happen here, and then it did. For the longest time the noise and bombast and hatred, all the way from the ‘‘harmless’’ stupid drunk uncle to the seething white supremacists, simply hung in the air, a hateful noxious cloud, more acrid and more harmful if you were ‘‘other’’, but not deadly, not yet.
Then our luck ran out, and some monster consumed by unreasoning hate seized his chance, and it was monstrous.
Terrorists aim to throw us off course. Screw you; we’re not doing that. We gasp. Then we go on.
So at the end of the afternoon, you wonder: is it disrespectful to go off tonight with these tickets to Alejandro Escovedo, the amazing songwriter and guitarist from Texas, supported by Adam McGrath, troubadour of Christchurch, and you think: yes. You don’t get to change anything.
So off you go to the Tuning Fork with your friends, and the mood is, if not sombre, certainly subdued.
He came on quietly. He picked up his guitar and began to play, and the subdued room was warm in moments. He shared stories. He was entrancing.
He talked about his father in the 1930s crossing the border from Mexico to Texas and the bigotry and the harsh treatment he encountered.
He said he had thought that it was all in the past, but now here comes Trump calling Mexicans rapists and criminals and here it is, all come back again.
And after an hour of the stories and the perfect music, Alejandro said, ‘‘Can you bring up the house lights and can you come and join me, Adam?’’, and he came down from the stage into the
middle of the room and they played in the round and the way they talked and sang and played with so much emotion, these two great guys, having just met a few hours earlier, was astonishingly good, and you bet, we loved it.
He talked about how music crosses borders and how music creates love, and he confessed he had wondered what to say on such an unreal day and whether he should perform at all and the room as one said, thank you so much for doing this, so glad you did.
When people come close together, they get to know one another and so very often, no matter the differences, they find a way to bond. The more remote you are, the more it’s possible for you to imagine that the other is different. The nearer people get, the tougher it is for the lies of bigotry to hold.
Our social media has aided and abetted isolation, made it easy for like-minded haters to come together to share lies about people, to demonise them.
Those lies and demonisation are not new at all; history is full of genocide and hate. But social media has made it alarmingly easy to accomplish.
People rightly ask how Facebook can be so very effective at ascertaining, for the purposes of making money, that a person is pregnant almost before they know it, but can do so little to identify the activities of people with deadly intent.
Anjum Rahman, a strong woman of peace who speaks for Muslims here, said: ‘‘We have lived with this fear in the back of our mind. We know that global events have an impact here.’’ Anyone and everyone who has helped this happen should reflect on that.
Some people who have in very recent memory been happily demonising immigrants and Muslims are now declaring that this is not the time to be political. OK, fair enough.
You condemn this outrage, and you probably feel it is nothing you would ever condone but your words, mild and enlightened as you may consider them, have nonetheless helped stoke this fire.
Will you now cease this talk for good? Or will you once more, a month from now, be defending the right of – say – Canadian hucksters coming here to spread inflammatory messages of bigotry?
Surely we’re agreed that no-one wants to see this happen ever again, and there’s probably never been a better time to press forward and get those ludicrous weapons banned.
But challenging attitudes is less easily done. Bigotry can be a weapon too. Why in the face of what has happened should freedom of speech not have some qualifications?
The nearer people get, the tougher it is for the lies of bigotry to hold.