Grace Under Leadership

This incredible image by Christchurch Council Photographer Kirk Hargreaves. It will come to define this moment in our history.

This is both leadership and grace personified, New Zealand's PM Jacinda Ardern mourning the tragic events in Christchurch. Our hearts breaking with hers in the shocking face of violence and terror.

I had a very pretty post ready on how Mercury's cazimi and his rebirth through the beating heart of the sun was finding its echo in our lives. How we all continually wrangle the holiest trinity there is, the one that we see constantly reflected back to us by our world.
Life. Death. Rebirth.
Life.
Death.
Rebirth.

And again. Once more we weep.

Since the awful fissure opened by the Christchurch hate crime - for it is something more and less than that - it strikes me too how we are being mercurially schooled in the devastating power of words. Manifesto. Propaganda. Media. Socials. Politics. All capable of shaping words into weapons of mass destruction. The sinister use of words to foster easy division and mindless hatred, because when you divide people and afear them, you control them.

Leadership shows its true nature - also expressed as words - at times like these. Jacinda's first response was to unite her people in the face of such tragedy and to unequivocally condemn violence. Far lesser leaders used Australian parliamentary letterhead or world media to reflect the shameful underbelly of entrenched racism, vilification and baseless profiling that is the root rot. And it is the human race's biggest problem. All of us. As a whole.

If we are to be the change we wish to see in the world - magic words expressed by Gandhi in the mid 1940s that we are still some way from getting down - we must each excavate that rot. In ourselves. In our families. In our communities. In our stories. In our world. We must see it. No one can look away anymore.

But first, we must grieve. Sit useless and devastated and so very sad. Because as Jacinda so eloquently put it, they are us. And here we all are.



Words c. Kerrie Basha 2019