Truly the best amid the worst
I’ve been impressed with Jacinda Ardern, and also with our media covering the Christchurch mosque attacks. In the face of the worst that can happen, they’ve stayed on task when words would have failed many of us. This has been a human crisis, even if it’s an international news event, and Ardern responded as an empathic human being. A lot can be said without bombast, threats and posturing. Dignity works. It’s a pity more world leaders don’t realise that.
As reporters, we’ve traditionally had it that outbursts of emotion, like tears, are inappropriate; the ideal is cool objectivity at all costs. But that’s impossible.
Our media workers shed tears, as surely everyone must, for the sheer futility of hate, and for so many lives torn across and lost, for the sake of a lie.
A young man believed the lie that ‘‘invaders’’ were a threat to our peaceful existence. He couldn’t comprehend that he was the unwelcome invader, and his targets were just people, each different, each the same in seeking a better life, in their love of family, and in their religious observance.
The victims were not radical extremists but fathers, uncles, wives, friends, mothers, neighbours, children. Surely only a dehumanised fanatic could kill a beautiful 3-year-old boy who reportedly ran towards him and his gun, expecting to play a game.
How touching innocence is, and how bland evil. The man I won’t name was short, chunky, prematurely balding, a nobody you’d pass in the street without a gun. No wife will miss him when he vanishes from human society, and no children will grow up blighted by his name. It’s a given that he has no religion, so fears no God.
I picture him in his prison cell, alone, without newspapers, radio or TV news, unable to enjoy the international coverage of his savagery, with nothing to read and nothing to do but press-ups, if he can be bothered. His food won’t be delicious, and no-one interacting with him will extend a friendly hand because his actions have stranded him too far from the comfort of a human touch.
He has become a curiosity, not the hero he imagined. Nor is he impressive as a prototype of a superior race. Such a race, which exists nowhere, would hopefully have superior thinking. He says his role model is Anders Breivik, the Norwegian white supremacist who killed 77 people eight years ago, and who has appealed to a series of disaffected young males ‘‘in violent pursuit of a deluded masculine ideal’’, as a
Washington Post writer put it, ever since. There is an enormous internet fan club of yet more Breivik admirers, passing images of carnage on to each other, and sometimes seeking to emulate him.
We should worry about people who seek to be desensitised: it’s too easy for them to find images of cruelty that once would never have been in circulation. When such morbid interest goes with social isolation and a sense of grievance, it will only lead to trouble.
It also disrespects the victims, exploited in death to be gaped at by people with no sense of shame. There is a place for shame, and this is one of them.
Police, ambulance workers and hospital staff endured the aftermath of the massacre, and still do, as did the road worker who held an injured stranger outside one of the mosques, talking to him quietly, so he wouldn’t die alone.
In such acts of gentle kindness this past week the worst of times truly became the best of times.