Vigilance

Vigil

There is a
vigil in my village tonight for the those murdered in the mosque attacks in
Christchurch.  I live in Paekakariki, New
Zealand.  Members of our small community
will gather to remember the victims of this horrific slaughter.  Other communities in New Zealand are holding vigils,
as are other groups around the world.  We
come together to mourn, to connect and to be in solidarity. 

As New
Zealand’s Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, said in her first comment after the
attack:

“Many of those who will have been
directly affected by this shooting may be migrants to New Zealand, they may
even be refugees here. They have chosen to make New Zealand their home, and it
is their home.  They are us.”

The world needs a bigger sense of “us”, not a smaller
one.  We at Cultivating Leadership, a
global firm that began in Paekakariki, state our purpose as being, “to cultivate ideas, practices, and
communities that release the world from simplistic thinking and enable progress
on our most complex challenges.” 
Implicit in this is a bigger sense of humanity and connection, a way
that we realise that we are in this together on planet earth and all of our
most pressing challenges require collaboration across different creeds and
identities. As we know in our leadership work, such collaboration is not easy.  It requires us to be confident of ourselves
and also able to be open and vulnerable with others.  Fears shut us down.

The word
vigil comes from the Latin to be awake. 
But there are many forms of being woke, it seems, and different words derive
from this root.

Vigilantes

There is a
wave of rejection in many countries of this need to be inter-connected and to
celebrate both our diversity and our common humanity in constructive and
creative ways.  There is a drumbeat of
national or ethnic or religious purities.  This includes a rise in the expressions of white
nationalism.  At its extreme, manufactured
fears of “the other,” fanned in the intense feedback loops of social and other media
creates meaning and belonging driven by hate and, ultimately, groups and
individuals functioning as armed vigilantes. 
The hero stories of these vigilantes are often that they are not “haters”
but instead “protectors.”  Their stories are
that they are protecting their nearest and dearest from invasions of foreigners
or attacks on their values.  They are
protecting against the “others.” 

Vigilance

We need
vigilance on many fronts.  Mostly we need
to be awake to the stories that we spin about our rightness and our superiority
and our fear of others.  We need to watch
for the ways these stories can have such a deep hold on us.  In New Zealand one of our stories has been
that we lived a long distance away from many of the world’s threats.   In a way we did, and now we do not.  And yet, even in the faces of these malignant
forces, there are things we can offer.  We
are a small and open and tolerant society. 
We have tried, however imperfectly, to begin righting the wrongs of our colonial
“superiorities” and our dispossession of Maori. 
We need to be vigilant to enable us to continue to be open and tolerant
and secure.  Our vigils of deep grief and
solidarity can also be ways to begin to make our worlds whole again and to
stand for a bigger sense of us.  And we
need to be awake to the layers of pain involved here.

As one of the halfbacks for the national rugby team, the All Blacks, T.J. Perenara, wrote yesterday: “While as cities and a nation we are all devastated by what happened yesterday, let’s not lose sight of the fact that yesterday’s terrorist attacks were targeted at the Muslim community. While it may have felt like it, we were not all at risk. We were not all unsafe. But we are all responsible for joining the wider conversation about racism, about white supremacy, about who we are as a country, and what’s actually going on.

“To our Muslim brothers and sisters – kei te heke ngā roimata, kei te ngākau pōuri au, ka aroha ki a koutou. I am so sorry this happened to you here. You should have been safe here, you should be safe everywhere. My heart is so heavy.”