KEY POINTS:
I was in Sydney the week of the Manurewa murders. What a blessed relief it was not to be a Polynesian in New Zealand that week.
I came home to gloating emails, challenging me to defend the indefensible.
What did I have to say about those involved in the robbery and killing of the Manurewa liquor store owner - men whom one correspondent referred to as "useless, vicious, scumbag relations" of mine.
What could I say? They seemed to prove every racist stereotype, every argument against Pacific immigration. Can the actions of a few young men undo every good thing achieved by the thousands of law-abiding Pacific Islanders in this country?
Yes, wrote one reader. "I am already back to my old stereotyping of the [Polynesian] propensity to commit crime and not have conscience or moral control. I forget the death camps littered around Europe only 60 years ago. I need to be reminded again."
I don't know these young men, but I am supposed to feel some solidarity with them, to sympathise with them rather than with the murdered father of three, or the 80-year-old grandmother beaten to death in her own home, or the 8-year-old boy who watched his mother being run over by the driver of a 4WD.
I am supposed to react as a Samoan rather than a human being. Already the story has us in our designated pigeonholes: the hard-working law-abiding Asian victims picked on by good-for-nothing Polynesian thugs.
A part of me wants to rail against the unfairness of that. Why must we all be tarred by the actions of a few? Do white people feel responsible for every evil act committed by other white people? Of course not.
And yet, I do feel responsible. I am disgusted and horrified by the callousness of the actions of those responsible and I am also ashamed.
Am I my brothers' keeper? Yes - as inconvenient and unpalatable as that is.
I realise that this is an unfashionable idea, that it has become acceptable, even admirable, to nurture a strong sense of individual entitlement and limited liability. To be only for ourselves, or our immediate families, or our tribes. But maybe it's time we resurrected it.
"No man is an island," wrote John Donne, the 17th century poet and preacher. "Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee."
How small and mean-spirited so much of today's public discourse seems in comparison.
We are, all of us, interconnected but to acknowledge that connection is to acknowledge our collective responsibility.
Denial is made easier for us because we have become more segregated as inequality has grown, more sharply divided along economic lines, and unfortunately ethnic and cultural lines.
But race is a convenient distraction. It's easier not to care for those in prison, for the children of beneficiaries, for the poor, if they look different from us, if we can blame their failings on race or define them as "the underclass".
Alan Johnson, a Manurewa Community Board member, was right when he wrote that the recent events had their roots in indifference - personal indifference, official indifference and political indifference.
Such indifference is possible only if we believe ourselves unconnected.
It's easy to see the devastation wrought by the callous business practices of finance companies, which have cheated thousands of investors out of their life savings.
But we've been slow to acknowledge the damage done by the arrival of liquor stores in poor neighbourhoods - despite evidence of a clear link between the availability of alcohol and higher rates of murders, assaults, domestic violence, and despite the repeated pleas of the people who live in those neighbourhoods.
People everywhere do terrible things, and sometimes there are no satisfactory explanations. But South Auckland's troubles aren't mysterious. It is a fertile ground for crime, despite the many good people who live there, because we have made it that way.
These were already highly vulnerable communities. Many of its residents are the collateral damage of economic policies that not only deprived them of their livelihoods and weakened safety nets, but also made their neighbourhoods more hazardous places to live, by removing protections from liquor outlets, pokie machines and loan sharks.
We didn't simply leave the gate open for the wolves; we welcomed them in and showed them where to feed.
The easy availability of cheap alcohol was the inevitable spark in an already explosive mix: one of the highest concentrations of children and young people in one of the poorest suburbs in the country.
Now we judge from what we imagine is the safe distance of our nice neighbourhoods, and think we're immune to what's happening in South Auckland, that it will never touch us. We're wrong.
* Tapu.Misa@gmail.com
