The Angels of Paris

Count the days.  

In three weeks' time, maybe a month, facebook profiles will shed the tricolour filters and normal transmission will resume.  Passions will subside.  The bitter residue of shock will linger and perhaps manifest in sideways sympathy at a thing we called Islam and a people called Muslims.   They are our community but we will look at them differently.  We won’t remember, or even bother, to ask why.  Because if we bother to ask why, we will be confronted by the weakness  of our own ideologies.  In three weeks from now we might not realize that the “terrorist” has struck us hardest and worst by changing our view of things, by changing the way that we look at “others”: our neighbours, our colleagues, our classmates - the friends who move amongst us but persist in not looking like us. 

In three weeks, the tricolour filters will fade and go the way of the #jesuischarlie.  Bombing of all varieties will continue silently in those other places whose names suggest a heightening awareness of the world: Kobane, Mosul, Kirkut, Fallujah, Baghdad, Beirut.  In Aleppo and Tal Abyad the Turkish government have a historic opportunity: tacitly using ISIS to get rid of the Kurds once and for all.  Turkey will have to choose her enemy wisely: the one with morals who can’t be bought or the one who can be bought but with no morals at all.  But the bombings and  and the beheadings are not the ends.  They are the means.  The ends are to make us fearful, watchful and hateful, to make us . . . un-neighbourly.  The media-backed terrorist will defeat most of us without firing a single shot.

In three weeks the tricolour filters will fade  and we should ask ourselves this:  at what cost do we budget our moral indignation to spend only on our traditional allies.  Because the people of the world are being savaged and if we continue to ignore those other victims, that same savagery will come to visit us in evermore fierce and frequent measure. 

In three weeks, after the tricolours have faded, the Angels of Paris will go on to teach the world it's most important lessons.  If they leave a noble legacy it will be in teaching "us"
to mourn the unknowns and the unsung, those who have shared in similar horrors - from Paris to Pakistan, from Syria to Sudan, from Nairobi to Nigeria.  The Angels of Paris will teach "us" that we are soldiers in a war against ideology, extremism, hatred and violence.  They will teach us that the only useful weapons in a war of this kind are the ideas we plant in the minds of our youngest.  They will teach us that many of us don't know yet know which side we are on.

Three weeks.  Count the days.

Something Exciting, Something Incredible.

There are things I notice and I’m not sure why.  Two months I took a plane trip to Wellington and I was very excited.  I hadn’t been on a plane for close to ten years and this flight would only last 45 minutes.  I felt like an astronaut.  I imagined I was doing something nobody had ever done before, that nobody could ever do.  I was going to be in the air, in that sky above me.  I would be doing something absolutely un-human – flying in the face of gravity.  There were others on the plane but I didn’t care.  The pilot, the girl who gave the instructions, the other passengers . . . irrelevant.

But they weren’t irrelevant.  I was trying hard to contain my excitement.  I wanted to communicate to my fellow passengers that I was seasoned, I was a veteran, I had done things and I wasn’t phased.  A woman appeared at the departure gate and I strode toward her with my boarding pass.  She asked me to go back and wait until the gate was open and the control desk was being attended.  I tried to make sure that nobody had seen me and the my cover had not been blown.  I took a seat in the waiting area and tried to look cool and relaxed.

It seemed like an age before I was finally sitting in the plane looking out across the wing.  I couldn’t stop smiling and was fighting the urge to look around the aircraft, to touch things and try things out.  I took the coffee, and the biscuits and the cup of water and the lolly to suck on and I read all the magazines and the in-flight instructions.  Why?  Because it was there.  And then the plane landed.  And I stepped out of the plane and walked across the tarmac like somebody important who’d just done something incredible.  And I had.  I’d sailed in a tin can at 40,000 feet and made it from Hamilton to Wellington in 45 minutes.  Anybody in a plane should always have something to write home about.

Good for Nothing.

There are days when one is struck by the bleakness of all things.  Days when we feel goaded into a frenzy of activity for the simple reason that we feel we should be doing something.  If we aren’t doing anything . . . then what is our purpose?  From the corner looking on, much human activity looks pointless.  It seems to bear no productive or positive or meaningful end result.  The purpose appears to keep people busy, to give folk something to do.  It is becoming increasingly a matter of morals.  To do or not to do.  We can’t have people just sitting around doing nothing.  They should be doing . . .  something.  People need to be busy, people should be busy because, well . . . 

But what can anyone be doing or producing that someone else is not already doing perfectly adequately and in sufficient quantity?  There is it appears an  overwhelming surplus of activity.  Busyness, creating friction, creating heat, smoke and then fire - a not so spontaneous combustion consuming oxygen at an alarming rate.  In that world the person sitting around doing nothing ,makes a contribution to society at least as valuable than the man spinning himself into a frenzy trying to accomplish everything.

The person who does nothing is at peace.  He goes quietly and creates no wreckage.  He burns no excess of fuel or energy.  He leaves plenty for others.  He is selfless in his quietude.    The person who does everything is driven by a dangerous cocktail of fear and greed, stirred and disguised as ambition.  That person creates havoc, waste and chaos.  He leaves devastation in his wake.  There is only the ego at work on itself, agitating, inflating, imposing it’s will onto everything and everyone.  That person has an insatiable appetite for activity and attention and for possession.  There is no need for his excesses but he refuses to be empty-handed.  What a terrifying burden.  No wonder that person tries so hard to force it on to others.

Ye Shall Know Them By Their Works.

While some of my very best friends are Mormons I don’t make it habit to write about them or about myself.  But an interesting thing happened to me recently.  I was walking home carrying three heavy bags of groceries and a fourth in the pack on my back.  Striding towards me were a tall older man and his wife wearing shorts, t-shirts and sneakers.  It was a Saturday afternoon.  The couple were politely trying to outpace two much younger men walking either side. They had short tidy hair parted to the side.  Both wore dark suits, white shirts and neckties.


Walking alone, weighed down with my shopping I was an easier target.  They paused, waited for me to approach and as soon as I was within range, they introduced themselves as Elder this and Elder that.  They were very polite and asked me the usual things.  Had I heard of the Book of Mormon?  Had I had the lessons?  Did I know about the Church and would I like for them to come to my house and talk about God’s plan?  Yes, yes, yes . . . no.  Was I sure?  Yes.  Was I sure I was sure?  Yes . . . yes.  My arms were tiring but I wasn’t slowing down and they were keeping up.


I was tiring and so were they.  It was becoming obvious: I wasn't going to say yes to the lessons, I’d already heard the message many times over.  I did not care for more talk.  Plainly I was not a good prospect and clearly in a hurry to get my shopping home.  They wished me a nice day, turned around and walked back in the direction we had come from.

Bicycle Riding Dole Bludger Stopped by Hamilton City's Finest.

The clients, as they are known, of WINZ Hamilton East were treated to a random act of state-sponsored street theatre last week, courtesy of Hamilton City's Finest.  It could have gone unnoticed but the reception area was so full, the automatic doors wouldn’t close.  Standing room only, it was a beggars banquet minus the banquet, a wearied, burdened audience of 40-50 year olds.  Tired, cynical, dejected.

The collective quiet was broken by the “woop” and honk of a police siren, a patrol car shepherding the offender to the roadside.  It was a young man riding an old bike.  He was unshaven, wearing jandals, torn jeans, t-shirt, leather waistcoat, rasta-beads and a  khaki shoulder bag.  He wore nothing on his head except for an impressive afro, reminiscent of the late great 1970s.

We know about judging books by their covers, about the difference between appearances and realities.   But the audience saw him immediately as one of their own, a man with neither work nor money.  They understood that the price on his un-helmeted head would take out the best part of his week’s money.  Most of them however, didn’t see anything at all.  They were staring into the tough industrial grade carpet under their rough-shod feet, gazing into their own certain futures.