Kylie Klein-Nixon
Iwish I could tell you that when I left work on Sunday, after three of the most harrowing days in the newsroom in my working life, I went home and slept. didn’t. I drove home, ate an entire packet of Tim-Tams and went full Alt-Liam Neeson on the internet.
Fifty people – Muslim Kiwis, visitors, people we’d invited here to find respite from war and violence, our wha¯ nau – had been mindlessly murdered at two mosques in Christchurch.
Like almost everyone in the country, I was shattered watching the story unfold, disgusted, heartsick. But I was also filled with seething, boiling – and ultimately impotent – rage.
So, off I stomped all over Twitter and Facebook looking for anyone foolhardy enough to suggest guns weren’t the problem, or racism wasn’t the problem – or whatever wasn’t the problem that always bloody is the problem – to have a frank and unflinching ‘‘discussion’’ with.
How dare they? How dare they incite this horror with their ‘‘whatabout-ism’’ and their ‘‘reverse racism’’, their ‘‘both-sides-are-equal’’ nonsense, their lies?
I was itching for a fight. And like a drunk throwing punches in a beer barn parking lot, I found it.
News flash: This is one of the worst possible ways to respond to tragedy. Not just for the sake of victims, survivors and everyone in your path, but for yourself. Don’t do it.
When I woke up on Monday, I felt a thousand times worse. I was sick as. If anyone had needed my help that day for anything, I would have been no use to them.
So much for fearlessly using my white privilege to stand up for the survivors and minorities. I could barely stand up to make a cup of tea.