It’s common – in social media circles these days – when confronted with a sudden and/or traumatic life event to simply say, ‘I have no words.’
I was tempted to do the same this week – because amidst the avalanche of comment which has already come out in the wake of Friday’s shocking, hideous and manifestly evil mass murder in Christchurch I wasn’t sure I could add anything of worth.
As the hours, then days, passed however, and as both my conscious and unconscious minds gnawed away at the sheer horror (50 dead) of what occurred in an hour and a bit on an otherwise ordinary Friday afternoon on ‘our’ beautiful Garden City, I decided I did have something to say, and that is this.
All of us are immigrants to this wonderful little Island nation of Aoteoroa/New Zealand, and once here the vast majority of us simply get on with the job of life, fitting in as best we can. Sure we bring with us our ‘DNA’ (social and cultural mores, religious beliefs, music, dance, customs and food) from whence we came, but nine times out of ten it is manifested – and reciprocated – in a positive way.
I know this because of the drifting I do.
Mainstream media might misrepresent drifters as a bunch of largely white, hoodie-wearing bogans, but the reality – and this, remember, is based on my direct experience – is so different it is scary that those in positions of such power to influence ‘the masses’ can get it so wrong!
Turn up at a Mad Mike Drift Force day at Hampton Downs or Drift Direct day at Evergreen Drift Park and you will find what I can only characterise as a ‘rainbow collection’ of nationalities, ethnicities and ages, all united by nothing more or less than a shared love of using engine power and torque to atomise rubber (tyres) into smoke.
It’s the human equivalent, if you like, of the mix (and match) of engines under the bonnets of cars at a typical D1NZ series round; everything from hi-tech, highly-strung four cylinders to limiter-bashing turbocharged sixes, lazy V8 torque-monsters, an exotic Japanese-based V12, and our local specialty, high-revving Mazda rotaries!
This is the present, the here and now; in fact if where I live, work and socialise in Auckland is anything to go by it is the reality for every Kiwi living in Aotearoa/New Zealand in the early years of the new millennium no matter what their religion, creed or skin colour.
It’s a beautiful thing, and one which fills me with hope for the world my kids are going to live their lives in.
Which is why it beggars belief that Brenton Tarrant and his co-accused would not only not want to be a part of it, but would want to actively try through some horrific act of hatred to change its course.
Icarve
Good onya Ross well said!