https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2019/04/conspicuous-grieving-and-the
The recent tragedy of Christchurch was, for once, not an act of the God of earthquakes but yet another in the long history of actions that serve to remind us all of the “evil that men do”.
One always hopes, against hope, that there will be at least a few days, even a few hours, for those grieving to be allowed to begin to deal with their losses, to come to terms with the enormity of what has occurred, and simply to set their faces to the suffering and pain that must come their way. One hopes, though sadly nowadays it is only a futile hope, that they will be left in peace by the analysers, the 24-hour-news cycle jockeys, the instant pundits and ideologues of all persuasions. But no, it was indeed too much to hope for. Even when the site of the carnage is dear, sweet, innocent New Zealand.
Alas, there is a phenomenon emerging in the age of instant media and of hopelessly divided societies – perhaps we should call it Tarrant’s Law – of the shrinking of the time between an atrocity and the first political comment about it. There can be little doubt that this time lapse is getting shorter and shorter, and that the propensity to be outrageous in one’s politicisation has proportionally increased as well. The prize for Christchurch surely goes to the tweeters who blamed Donald Trump, for “enabling” white supremacist slaughters. But there have been other contenders; politicising tragedy now takes a number of broad forms.
First, there is the naming of adjectival terrorism. The aversion that many in the mainstream and leftist media and across most police forces to placing the “M” adjective in front of terrorists who slaughter Christians and the infidel generally, lest we light a fire under rampant, casual Islamophobia, strangely vanishes in cases where Muslims are the sad victims of the slaughter.
In cases like Christchurch, the adjectives tumble out. There were three here: “Australian”, “white” and “right wing”. Labelling early saves analysts and ideologues the trouble of justifying this later. By then, everyone is usually on board with the descriptors, and therefore with the embedded understanding of why something like this happens. The use of adjectives merely saves you from having to come up with any deeper explanation of what are inevitably complicated matters with both proximate and remote causes.
