A little over a month ago, Evan was being chatted up by a retired fisherman out front of the one and only grocery store on Stewart Island, the little "third island" off the south end of New Zealand. They got talking politics. "Are there extremists in New Zealand?" Evan asked him.
The guy curled up his weathered face in a wry grin. The question itself seemed silly on its face. "Nah, son -- there's nothing extreme about New Zealand."
That became a sort of mantra for our trip, a phrase we returned to every time we marveled at how level-headed and sane the Kiwis seemed to be in comparison to us. Over and over, we couldn't help but notice: things just worked. The social contract held. Things that needed to be done got done. There are serious issues of equity and justice, to be sure; but everybody seemed to be in agreement about what they were, and that they ought to be solved. They believed it, and we felt it: whatever the issue, the good faith and good will of New Zealanders was sure to win out in the end.
Two weeks and one day before the shooting, we checked into our hotel in Christchurch -- just one block away from Al Noor Mosque. The area between the mosque and the hotel is a block of beautiful old Art Deco buildings that's been turned into a lively shopping street, with lights and music and restaurants drawing busy summer evening crowds. A restaurant built into a fully restored old wooden trolley occasionally makes its way through. We were there on the eve of the Chinese New Year, and the locals were gathering for a lantern festival in the nearby park and gardens.
It was normal, in all the best senses of healthy and happy and unperturbed. There's nothing extreme about New Zealand, we said again, basking in the summer night air.
But now we know: we were blessed to be there in the last innocent moments in which that could honestly be said. Thursday's shooting can't help but change Kiwis' concept of themselves, the way 9/11 changed our concept of who we are. That sweet and reasonable sense of openness and moderation that seems so central to who they are will never again seem quite so assured. They will never again be able to take it for granted in that same easy way.
The loss of life is horrific. One in five hundred of the nation's Muslims was hurt or killed in the attack. There's never been a mass murder of this scale anywhere in the country in modern times. But the loss of the core sense of Kiwi sensibility -- the security that there's nothing extreme about New Zealand -- is also probably a permanent loss. The insanity of the larger world has finally crossed the broad oceans, and touched them; and because of that, they can never be quite the same.
The fact that the shooter was an Australian will be deemed rather important (and, with the characteristically abbreviated charity typically extended to their bigger neighbor, judged to be unsurprising). It's the fact that will allow them to keep telling themselves that no real Kiwi would have done this. There's still nothing extreme about New Zealanders, even if this particular extreme thing happened in New Zealand.
But I wonder how long that will hold. I still grieve what 9/11 has done to Americans. It was a long, dark rip through our national soul that continues to fester and bleed, turning us into something far crueler and darker that we were before. Having that evil visited on us has made us more willing to contemplate evil in return. The knowledge that yes, these things can happen here, on our soil, in our safest spaces, is a violation, a trauma, that cannot help but change how you look at everything -- especially your own assured sense of security -- forever after.
I was privileged to get to know that lovely country in the last moments before that trauma -- the final days when it could be said, in truth, that there is nothing extreme about New Zealand. I hope to hell that they handle it better than we did. It seems possible that they might: Christchurch was utterly flattened just three years ago in a massive (one might even say extreme) earthquake, and is still very actively in a process of rising out of the rubble. People who live in earthquake country develop a sort of blithe resilience; Kiwis, like Californians, will take certain forms of devastation in stride.
But there's nothing in their history that has prepared them for an event like this. I wish them hope and strength to hold onto that core sense of who they are, even as their world has suddenly become extreme in a way it never was before. I hope they hold onto each other, and their values, and their own profound sense of themselves as reasonable and gracious. I hope the trauma doesn't make them mean, the way it's made us and so many other nations mean.
The world needs more New Zealand. Especially the part that's able to deal with extreme situations without becoming extreme in response.
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