What the shooter didn’t think of

The moist-lipped ambition of the mosque shooter was that his crimes be seen as an act of strength. Instead they stand testament to the harm of weakness; the weakness of a small thinker with a malfunctioning mind and a malnourished spirit. He has emerged from a darkness of cultural isolationism, committed his crimes and will return to a deeper darkness and more profound solitude. Because, whatever the result of judicial process, he has made it his natural state.

The blighted future for which he sacrificed innocents is really a distant past; a savage, tribalistic society, huddled in crippling fear of the perceived outsider. But humanity cries out to humanity. That is why his attempts to inflict division have led, unless we are sorely mistaken, to something else entirely.

The people he seeks to separate instead stand shoulder to shoulder to confront and oppose what the world’s great cultures each recognise as the barbarity of extremists who sometimes lurk in their midst.

The Christchurch killer shot people as if they were inconsequential except as fodder to his agenda. Now the accused is rendered a pixilated presence in our thinking, while those he wrenched from us stand so vividly in our consciousness. Their humanity is seen as what it always was, unassailable. His own is questioned.

Those who survived will be welcomed back into a wider community that is more grateful than before to have them among us. And all those he hurt, physically or not, will find themselves surrounded by many who want to help, if only they know how. That is a question so many are asking, perhaps more purposefully than in past times.

So alongside figuring out how better to calibrate vigilance through our Government and its agencies, what more we should require of social media companies, and exactly how godgiven is the right to weaponry, the sincere and urgent call arises for societal change at a more personal level.

Yes, that’s to be expected. And it’s understandable that it is being expressed in lofty terms of embracing love and resisting hatred. These are real, meaningful goals, the pursuit of which, at least for starters, requires some pretty small and achievable steps.

Let’s not overlook one change that has already happened among us. Shyness. It’s subsided. A bit. Which is brilliant. New Zealand can be a shy outfit. So can our new arrivals. It’s not that close and casual friendships are a rarity, nor deeper, loving ones, but in the normal course of events there’s a common tendency towards reticence.

When we’re swept by collective grief, outrage and a massive sense of wrongness, things tend to open up. A man with the worst will in the world sought to divide us deeply. We aspire to have it lead to more love.