Leanda Lee
35 years on, we have been reminded all too often these last weeks of acts of violence against others. John Lennon was assassinated on 8th December 1980 at the hands of someone deranged, with a gun.
In the last year alone, the USA has seen 353 deranged acts listed one by bloody one on www.shootingtracker.com. The latest recorded on 2nd December was the San Bernardino mass shooting by the husband and wife duo, killing 14 and wounding 21. The mere existence of a website recording such data from 2013 is a shocking reminder that not all liberties liberate. Automatic weapons in the hands of people with intent – even if for that one deranged moment – caused this carnage.
In 1996, Australian Martin Bryant killed 35 and injured 23 people in a rampage known as the Port Arthur massacre. This incident was the impetus behind Australia’s strict gun control and licensing laws for which Prime-Minister of the day, John Howard, is applauded. Australia has no call for a shooter tracker website. She might still have crazy people with intent but not crazy people with intent with easy access to semi-automatic or automatic weapons.
As the November 13 Paris attacks and subsequently reported attacker profiles have shown, not all the bad guys are crazy. Principles, values, beliefs – however warped the socialisation appears – underlie the potential for mass murder.
The best-selling single of John Lennon’s solo career, John and Yoko’s Imagine, resonates truer than ever. Sovereignty, religious perversion, greed; all have potential to pit man against man.
In younger days, I did not need to imagine living in peace. I had a life free from violence, from guns, or even anger. Flickers of happenings elsewhere crossed the television screen for a half an hour each night but the lives of almost everyone around me were remote from this. A decided lack of interest in current affairs, of keeping up with the news and conflicts elsewhere kept me sheltered; kept me ignorant.
I did not need to imagine. Meritoriously chosen authority figures were trusted. Religion was school chapel once a month; uplifting choral music; memories of suppressed giggles as a kitten struggled over the organ pedals or that Sunday the altar-boy doused the deacon with water from the chalice as his cassock caught fire – too close to the candles, he was; mystical architecture; and the occasional reminder of how to live well. Countries were other places to visit with interesting food and quaint customs: welcoming.
There were no principles for which I would die, for life was sacrosanct and having no understanding of the values that created this existence, I could not conceive of a life without them. There too were no principles imaginable for which others would kill. Irrelevant political and ideological debates were tiresome. I was living in peace, and I could not imagine otherwise.
The other day I read: “We were all humans until race disconnected us, religion separated us, politics divided us and wealth classified us.” But it has always been so. Seemingly inconsequential comments such as that by Secretary for Security, Wong Sio Chak to the effect that the victims of most of the recently reported gaming related crimes were non-resident so residents should not be impacted, show that one class of being is more valued than another. More substantial symbols of division such as China’s National Day of Remembrance of the Nanjing Massacre serve to perpetuate and instil hatred rather than imagine a harmonious relationship.
Surely the aim is not to imagine living life in peace. The aim is to live that life and imagine what it might be like otherwise: to know what we are protecting, to know our values, to know our how our social, cultural, political, and economic systems work together to provide us with a secure and meaningful existence. Imagine what the murderer will kill or die for, for without the ability to imagine this, we cannot conceive of what to protect or how. Without the Bataclan, Port Arthur, San Bernardino, or the 352 other mass shootings in the USA, could we still imagine?
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