The first murder of a famous person I remember was John Lennon in 1980.
I remember my parents being very upset, which wasn’t a common thing. The whole family gathered around the little black and white television to watch coverage of the terrible event and then they played the movie “HELP”. I had never seen such an outpouring of emotion; clearly a great human being had been taken from us.
I’d just turned nine years old and was in standard two at Westbrook primary. That year we were guinea pigs for a new teaching approach the school was using – open plan.
It basically meant the classroom was twice as big, there were twice as many kids, and we had two teachers. It can’t have been very memorable I remember only a couple of things, first that one of the teachers was called Mrs Basher, which was a pretty great name for a teacher back in those days of corporal punishment.
The other thing I remember was we had to perform a mimed scene in small groups to the rest of the class. My mates and I mucked around during the preparation time so when we got up in front of the other sixty kids we had no idea what we were doing or what scene we were performing.
One of my mates told me afterwards that he had been miming walking a dog and I was the dog – which was news to me. It’s funny the things that stick with you, it was mortifying at the time but really it was probably no worse than any of the other groups’ mimes.
What a different world it must have been the Berlin Wall was still there and would be for another decade, apartheid had over a decade to run and we were still playing sports with the white supremacists, Muldoon was PM and would win the election the following year.
There wasn’t much of an Olympic games in Moscow with half the countries staying away due to the war in Afghanistan, which was a basket case and has been for most of the years since.
To top it all off it didn’t look like the Beatles were going to get back together – too soon?
I remember the following year when they tried to kill Pope John Paul and hearing it on the radio. At that stage I had no idea about controversies around the Catholic church, or conflict between different faiths. The Pope just seemed like a kind old man who went round the world waving at people – why would anyone want to kill him?
Years later when I was at Uni they killed Yitzhak Rabin. He seemed like a very decent man trying to act fairly in an impossible situation – it was pretty obvious why they killed him.
By and large though this assassination thing seemed mainly to be an American thing - the Kennedys, Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X - as well as Lennon of course, surely it had to be something to do with all the guns?
Then on Friday we got the news that Shinzo Abe, the former PM of Japan who had been PM on and off for two decades had been shot. Japan doesn’t have a gun culture, they have very tight gun laws, much stronger than those here.
Our Prime Minister was online providing kind words, full of genuine emotion and caring, for her country at the sad time when news came through that he’d died. On the one hand that is her job on the other hand I couldn’t help thinking - who is looking after her when she might be upset and in need of comfort?
Even more importantly who is really looking after her, our secret service had better be doing a bloody good job, the thought of something like that happening to a politician here is awful.
The level of anger and aggression, of outright hatred, you see directed at our Prime Minister online is terrible. Of course the vast majority are full of bluster and bullshit but because Social Media makes it sound as if there are thousands of them, where would you even start with filtering out the 99% who are just woman-hating troglodytes from the tiny number that might actually do something insane?
And where do you draw the line so as not to trample human freedoms? Well I’d draw it somewhere where those using a profile picture saying “kill the bitch” are on the other side of it, preferably behind bars.
We’ve seen it in the UK of course with both left wing and right wing MPs, Jo Cox and Martin Amess, murdered by angry members of the public.
How can someone think it is OK to threaten violence and death to someone because they don’t like their politics?
I mean I didn’t like John Key I thought he was dishonest, motivated by greed, and his policies caused harm to hundreds of thousands of peoples lives in this country
But I don’t want anything bad to happen to him or his family. I imagine the family love each other as others, his kids seem relatively normal - well not the son obviously, what a colossal douche bag - still the acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree
Sure I might have suggested when he did particularly vile things he had quite a punch-able face, maybe even more so for Stephen Joyce, but that is different than actually wanting to hurt someone.
As for the media pardon my language - but fuck these pricks. The constant feeding of lies and negativity to angry disaffected people is not helping. There are ramifications from their behaviour above and beyond spinning to manipulate elections.
I think a lot of us have been worried seeing the unhinged rhetoric coming from the likes of the anti-mandate people or the Groundswell movement here. The complaints and accusations of both are so far from reality, so unhinged, you can only worry what sort of actions these people could muster.
Surely we need to rely on more than these people being just simple minded fools? It seems such a Kiwi thing – ah they’re just idiots so they’re harmless. But what happens when they’re not?
Our PM and other politicians are incredibly accessible in this country, no one wants it any other way - that is the sort of people we are.
But that laid-back attitude is dependent on people that go online to howl how angry and hateful they are actually behaving themselves in person. It’s worked OK so far, it’ll be fine for most of these people, but all of them?
You only get lucky so long.
I don’t know what the answer is. It feels like as a nation we lost some of our innocence on March 15 2019, I really hope not to see us lose any more. To lose our “she’ll be right” laid back approach that makes us Kiwis.
We don’t want our leaders removed from us by bullet proof glass, too many people don’t see them as actual living breathing normal human beings as it is.
Maybe things just aren’t tyrannical enough for anyone to take that sort of violent action? Is anyone really going to be driven to murder over a small charge on buying Utes or over Covid mandates that have largely finished?
Can we risk it?
Entire generations of Americans grew up with the mantra “ remember where you were when you heard” over the murder of JFK. A killing that represented more than the death of a man, it represented the triumph of evil over good.
Let’s keeps those “remember where you were” moments here for meaningless things like wining sporting trophies or positive things like passing progressive legislation.
Don't forget the attempt on the Trade Union movement in Wellington in 1984 that killed Ernie Abbott. It can happen again.
Masterfully written Nick. I am very concerned about the safety of our Hon Prime Minister too. The majority of the media outlets and journalists are responsible for spreading the vitriol, personal attacks, disrespect, misinformation and stirring up!! It is shameful and just plain and simply mind boggling and wrong!!