No one mourns the wicked
In the last week, two men who undoubtedly caused great harm to others have been shot and killed in very different circumstances.
Tom Phillips was killed in a shootout with police in Waikato. And Charlie Kirk was killed in what is widely presumed to be a politically-motivated assassination on a university campus in Utah. Both men died at the scene, but that’s about where the similarity ends.
Phillips has been cast as a villain, and rightly so. He kidnapped his children for apparently deeply selfish reasons, separating them from their wider whānau for years. The harm he has caused is serious, but it is also perhaps calculable and finite. His actions have had a profound impact on a relatively small number of people who will carry that harm through their lives.
In comparison, the harm caused by Kirk is incalculable. He has enthusiastically supported what is rapidly becoming a full-fledged fascist regime in the United States. He has personally propagated and egged on hatred towards transgender people, people of colour, immigrants, Muslims and just about anyone else who doesn’t agree with him. The harm he has caused will ripple through time and across generations. And yet, the narrative around Kirk paints him as the victim.
It is much easier to condemn the man who tore apart his family than it is to condemn the man who was tearing apart the world. There is something about the immediacy of the harm and the fact that we humanise the victims that makes it easier to judge one man over the other. There is a similar dynamic in transport safety - we spend a fortune taking every conceivable step to avoid trains or planes crashing in order to save a small number of lives. And yet, when it comes to road safety, we are miserly, counting every penny and accepting an astonishingly high level of deaths and injuries as normal and inevitable (especially if it means people get to keep driving). Effectively, we are willing to pay orders of magnitude more to stop a person dying in a plane crash than we are to stop the same person dying after being hit by a drunk driver speeding through a school zone.
It is easy to blame Phillips for his crimes. We can see and name his victims. We can put ourselves in their mothers’ shoes.
That’s harder with Kirk, because his crimes were both more grandiose and less tangible. But they were no less real. Whatever we might think of the circumstances of his death, he spent his life devoted to harming others. If Phillips deserves condemnation, Kirk deserves it a thousand times over.
No one mourns the wicked.