New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. Photo / SNPA
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. Photo / SNPA
COMMENT:
It'll again be a harrowing day in Christchurch and around the country tomorrow as the nation remembers the massacre of a fortnight ago.
The Prime Minister will again be in the city, mourning the 50 who were murdered in the two mosques during the hateful attack.
Jacinda Ardern was in Dunedin yesterday, which was the gunman's original target, meeting Muslims.
She was impressed with the story of one woman who told her that she'd lived in this country for more than a decade but has never felt more at home than she has since the attack.
And that says a lot about this country and Ardern's compassionate reaction to it.
They are us, she immediately assured the Muslim community, and rightly so.
Showing empathy at a time like this obviously goes some way to easing the pain for those who've been so devastatingly affected and thankfully our leaders have been good at it in the nation's time of need.
Like Ardern, John Key rightly won praise for the way he handled Christchurch's earthquake which left 185 dead in 2011.
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. Photo / SNPA
He flew to the city on the afternoon it occurred and says he felt he was abandoning the people there when he flew home later that night. He was to make many more visits in the weeks ahead.
A seismic event though is beyond anyone's control while the latest event in the city is societal and at least we can try and find out why it happened and hopefully try to stop it from happening again.
The Norwegian massacre a few months after the earthquake, which left 77 people shot dead by a man with similar views to the Christchurch gunman, their Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg declared there was one Norway before that dreadful day and there'll one after it.
Contrast those views with those of gun obsessed America after the many massacres there have been in that country.
The Oklahoma bombing of a federal building in the mid 90s left 168 dead in what is America's deadliest act of domestic terrorism.
It led to the call that if a foreign Government was found to be involved President Bill Clinton should launch a bombing campaign of such ferocity to render the guilty country militarily helpless.
Clinton himself was so enraged that he told an aide that he wanted to put a fist through the television.
A foreign Government wasn't involved, just three nutters who had a grudge against society.
And then in the most deadly attack on Jews in America's history, at a synagogue in Pittsburgh last October where 11 were shot dead, Donald Trump in his first call to the city's mayor offered prayers and sympathy but insisted on discussing harsher death penalty laws as a way to prevent such atrocities.
Trump didn't visit a synagogue when he visited the city a couple of days later.
