We’re less innocent now, but we’re kinder and closer

Ican’t speak for all the journalists covering the shootings at the mosques in Christchurch but the job we do is one way of being distracted from brooding on the lives devastated.

Journalists get used to battling with not necessarily compatible emotions in events like this. We have the same emotions of shock, loss and sympathy but we also need to get the story and pictures.

The feeling that New Zealand had changed irretrievably with the shootings was overwhelmed by where to go, who to interview, how close to get.

As I walked briskly towards the Masjid Al Noor on Friday through Hagley Park, with visual journalist John Kirk-Anderson, I worried to my shame that we had missed out on the action. I also looked at what I was wearing and thought only my shirt would make any sort of bandage if called on to help.

I don’t mean to make this column about us, the reporters and visual journalists chronicling the shootings and the aftermath. I don’t expect any sympathy and don’t ask for any. Journalists are not the story.

The competing priorities did not mask awareness of the extent of the calamity. It was clear in the faces we saw and the stories we heard. It will take time to properly absorb the horrors and feelings about them.

Being close to the happenings and the people affected allows some insights that, even if they have been expressed already, bear repeating.

Most journalists have been struck by the openness and lack of hostility from relatives and friends of the victims, both the dead and injured. We often intrude on grief, usually for good reasons, and get mixed reactions. But with this man-made disaster, people have been eager to have their stories told.

On one of the cordons last Friday, we had on one side a man who still had blood on his hands from tending to an injured teenager and, on the other, a woman weeping for the lost.

People there still wanted to relate what had happened even as they fielded a barrage of calls from concerned relatives. Get the story out, they seemed to be saying.

With this attitude the most affected by the shootings have done their related communities in New Zealand a great service. They have shrunk their otherness and reduced their difference in ways they may not yet appreciate.

With the telling of their stories, they have shown their struggles, hopes and joys are much the same as those who feel they have a greater connection to these islands by birth and ancestry.

Of course we should have long before made greater efforts to narrow the gap between ourselves and the new immigrants, especially those of different religions, ethnicities and customs.

Fellow columnist Joe Bennett wrote this week that the ‘‘oldest instinct of our species is that the alien is both inferior and a threat. The instinct lurks even in the nicest of us and it won’t go away. It’s what gives pep to an All Black test’’.

The instinct can be useful but it is also dangerous, particularly in the hands of some politicians and extremists. Only a few months ago, NZ First was promoting a test of New Zealand values for new immigrants. This tragedy has reminded us our most important values are universal.

By letting us into their lives, the Muslim community in Christchurch has helped break down barriers that should never have been there in the first place.

The change of attitude sparked by shootings will not necessarily make us into good or better people in the long run but it might help.

One of our reporters, whose appearance clearly indicates an ancestry in the Asian subcontinent, was called a foul racial insult a few years ago in Christchurch. This week he got hugs. The outpourings of goodwill may be shortlived but it at least set a benchmark.

Journalists got another insight last week when they were ushered into a courtroom in Christchurch to report on the accused shooter’s court appearance.

He was not the monster of evil eye and frothing mouth that we might have expected. The duty solicitor, Richard Peters, who acted for him on that first appearance, described a lucid, rational person.

Mass killers don’t necessarily have a certain look. It’s not so much that he could be one of us – he is one of us.

As the judge pointed out, Corrections had done him no favours in kitting him out for his court appearance. He was dressed in a sack-like tunic of some unknown but clearly tough cloth. He looked every inch a medieval serf, maybe a medieval butcher.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has vowed never to mention his name. I’m not sure that is helpful. It almost increases his notoriety. His actions are unspeakable but we should speak his name. His evil was human and that human should be named. It’s a bit late to rob him of notoriety. Every story and image about the shootings adds to his disrepute.

His mentality will be the subject of many stories and so it should be. Many people have hateful ideas and philosophies that make them feel better about their own failures, but very few thankfully act on them in an overt way. Understanding him might well prevent other tragedies.

The shooter has, for the moment, achieved exactly the opposite of what he was hoping to do. Instead of the discord and hatred he was hoping to sow, his killings have created a closer and more cohesive Christchurch and New Zealand.

He has shattered the conceits we have about our safe and green country but he has also put in neon lights the dangers of our tendency to dehumanise members of our community because they worship differently or don’t look like us.

From this loss of innocence, something stronger may grow.

His actions are unspeakable but we should speak his name. His evil was human and that human should be named.