Caleb Anderson: Simply Unfit for Office

We should be concerned about the increasing propensity of political figures to make public comments intended to incite a reaction.  

We should be equally concerned about the media's keenness to broadcast these comments without challenging them.

Over the past six years, the boundaries of acceptable political dialogue have been pushed.  As is often the case, each transgression emboldens the second, and third, and so on. 

 

Initially, it was open season on white males, then on white heterosexual males, and then on white heterosexual males of a conservative persuasion, and the ultimate insult is to add the designation of Christian to the list (other faith systems seem to be acceptable).

The media have published, more than once, the laments of Green and Maori politicians at the number of "white" faces in our parliament, and the number of "white male" portraits hanging on the interior walls of our parliament buildings.

Hateful articles, poetry, and artwork, aimed to denigrate members of "non-approved" groupings, and funded from the public purse, have been given wide circulation, and lauded by politicians and media.

We should be concerned that the words of some of our politicians before, and during, the visit by Posie Parker, appear to have contributed to the incitement of violence against her, and toward those exercising their free right to hear her speak ... and at the comments of a Green Party member who shifted the blame for the appalling behavior of protestors to white heterosexual males who, in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, in her opinion, are the perpetrators of all violence.  

No one seriously called her out.  No one asked her for documentary evidence of her extraordinary claim.

Recent pro-Palestine/Hamas comments made by another prominent Green Party politician at a recent rally bordered on anti-semitic  ...  her comments indicate that either she hasn't done her homework or was just carried away by the crowd.

Even more recent comments that challenging, or reversing, some of the previous government's policies would have "consequences" are extraordinary, especially given that the new government appears to have a clear mandate to do so.  

This comment was clearly not a comment of considered and thoughtful concern, it was a not-so-veiled threat.

Such comments are becoming so common now that they are passing without notice, we are becoming desensitized to them, they are becoming normalized ...  and, in so doing, we are giving warrant to those with a narrow and sometimes extreme agenda to push the boundaries even further.

The media doesn't dig.  Investigations into such actions, if they even occur, are a whitewash.  Apologies are never tendered, and the impacts of these hateful, unwarranted, and often unsubstantiated comments, and actions, are simply ignored.  

Avenues for redress appear to be only open to some and not to others.

I remember being foolish enough to enrol in some undergraduate sociology papers in the mid-eighties.  Here I was first exposed to the idea that vice resided in the domain of privilege alone, and virtue in that of the oppressed.  

In other words who you are, what you do, and what you say (i.e. your character), are not what defines you, you are defined by your group.

It is a tragedy that those who see themselves in the vanguard of the anti-hate speech movement, while enjoying the trappings of office, and dressed in a panoply of virtue, are often amongst the worst propagators of hate speech and division.  

In truth, a good number of our left-of-centre politicians are quite simply unfit for office ...  they have become the embodiment of the very things they profess to hate.

Caleb Anderson, a graduate history, economics, psychotherapy and theology, has been an educator for over thirty years, twenty as a school principal.