The casting of stones

It was the sight on TV the other night of those howling harridans mobbing Mayor Len Brown outside the Auckland Town Hall, waving placards and screaming SHAME and other mindless epithets I couldn’t catch, that finally did it for me.  The news next morning was that they showed up again in the public area at the Council meeting.  I am afraid some of them may actually be from local churches, yet again dragging intelligent and wise Christianity into disrepute.

Maybe we’ll know eventually whether Len Brown cares, or dares, to carry on as Mayor.  So far, seemingly, he does.  The councillors can’t depose him, so they had a long public debate and agreed to censure him, and they continue by any other means available to harass and humiliate him.  These are, you have to understand, Auckland’s right-thinking people of impeccable moral fibre.

In my view Len Brown does have to resign because too much damage has been done, most of which he hasn’t done himself.  It’s hard to see how he can effectively continue in the climate created.  Mostly this kind of damage is done by punitive, moralistic, self-righteous attitudes, by people demanding things, by those who howl and express high indignation from their moral high ground, censorious and actually frightened by evidence of human frailty and error.   It may include their own.  

But in the meantime, schools, retirement villages and kindy mums don’t want him at their celebratory events.  Len Brown did wrong.  He knows that.  So get over it.  I will not join in public crucifixions, or in the relentless public humiliation of someone we have decided we don’t like any more. 

And where, incidentally, are the church leaders right now, the bishops and assorted mullahs, the ones who claim to follow the man who was vilified because he consorted with publicans and sinners…?  The people who know very well that very few of us are entitled to indulge in this level of moral judgement seem to have headed for the hills.

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TVNZ treated us to some video clips from the crucial council meeting where they sat in judgement.  A room full of Pharisees.  (Well, perhaps as a New Testament scholar I can see that might be doing the Pharisees something of an injustice.)  The NZ Herald lovingly reported the remarks of each one who spoke.  One or two, Cameron Brewer and Dick Quax, seem seriously unpleasant people – the sort I’ve encountered a few times through the years, who make your spine shrivel.  Breathtakingly righteous.  Casters of the first stones. 

It is exactly like stoning for adultery.  Len Brown is daily and publicly more diminished as they pound the life out of him, led by the Herald Taliban.   Am I the only one who is finding this sickening?

Where angels fear to tread

Not for the first time, I am planting a few footsteps of my own where those of angels are generally absent.  Criminal charges against Peter Whittall, former CEO of the Pike River Mine, have been withdrawn.  The judge and counsel have informed us that the charges were unlikely to succeed, even after a lengthy and expensive trial.   We are now being told of shock and outrage.

Peter Whittall, who does seem a decent and caring man, asked that a fund that had been set aside for his defence should now be shared out among the Pike River bereaved families, about $110,000 each.  Some of them immediately labeled this blood money and said they would refuse it.  They are determined to see Peter Whittall convicted and punished, or if not, someone else “held to account” – only then will they experience something called closure.  One woman told the media that their men had not died, they had been killed.  They are actually prepared to see this man sent to prison so that they can feel better. 

But now it appears, a curious fellow named Graham McCready, a former accountant, has “vowed” (in the NZ media you have to vow things these days) he will file 29 charges against Whittall.   This character has already has some success in private prosecutions of people he disapproves of.  Does Magna Carta perhaps need amendment?  McCready seems to carry public-spiritedness to ebullient proportions.

Whittall has endured some two years of this sort of stuff already.  Of course the miners’ families would respond that they have been suffering too.  But now our Prime Minister has said “it’s not a good look” that the payment has been offered to the families – the PM is of course acutely aware of the look rather than the truth and realities, and he is the first, or at any rate the latest, to trot out the timeless cliché that it won’t bring their loved ones back. 

In my view all that is playing politics.  I would have thought the time has come when someone in authority, someone with mana, has to say firmly and publicly:  It’s over, folks.  You have to draw a line now.  It was a tragedy.  It was by no means the first mining tragedy in what is always a dangerous industry, and it was by no means the worst.  The bodies can’t be recovered without serious even unacceptable risk.  Their men will therefore have to lie where they are and be honoured in situ, as has been the case so often before in such disasters, in wartime, in death at sea, in many places and at many times, not forgetting deaths on Everest and such places.  Any evidence inside the mine will simply have to remain there mute.

As for blame…  Yes, it does matter that people understand how it happened and why, and how things can be improved.  Yes, it matters that willful negligence or incompetence should be recognized and dealt with.  Peter Whittall however clearly cared about his men.  He evidently himself worked under a seriously defective governance regime.  It is intolerable that he should now be led around any more like some sacrificial scapegoat, submitted to yet more public vilification, let alone sent to prison. 

It’s moving on time, folks.  The world has moved on.  Yes, you were deeply hurt and bereaved, but nothing stays still while you find some means to feel better.  Believe me, gaoling Peter Whittall will not assuage your grief or loss.  Start refusing the role of victims.  Make a few new decisions.  Stop the victim-meetings and all the name, blame and shame.  It’s a blind alley, believe me. 

And don’t tell me that I don’t understand the mining or Westland culture.  Of course I don’t, never having been part of it.  But I do understand something of grief and loss, tragedy and disaster.  Eventually you pick yourself up, check what’s left that is of worth, and you move on, fragile and wounded as most of us are one way or another anyway.  If you don’t, you’re in considerable trouble down the line.