When the Collective gets a bee in its bonnet about something

It is fascinating to me to track what happens when the Collective gets a bee in its bonnet about something. When a nagging feeling spreads, if there’s legs on the issue, if there is an integrity involved that stirs us deeply and nudges consciousness along, it multiplies...when the matter is unresolved it won’t just go away. Take the case of baby twins Chris and Cru Kahui who were killed in June 2006. The collective integrity senses there is something deeply troubling about a group of adults closing ranks and protecting themselves when a terrible terrible thing has occured - two innocent babies, victims of the ones they were most dependent on to protect them are dead. To date the case remains unsolved, largely because no-one in the family will talk about what they know about what happened to Chris and Cru. How could this happen? How could something so disturbing be allowed to occur? How can the adults be protected at the expense of justice for the babies we wonder?

Surely we all know deep down that rearing humans is the most vitally important job on the planet. It is sacred work. To take on the responsibility of shaping a new centre of consciousness, a human child, is a mighty privledge (one I never had the guts to step up to), and a huge repsonsibility in truth - one we can take on from an infinite range of possibilites and styles, and it takes no particluar state of awareness to procreate. There are basic essentials that seem to contribute to the Whole Health of a child and they are pretty obvious. Things like a safe environment, loving care givers, loving interaction, attachment, structure and routine, emotionally mature parents and so on. The form these environments take can be in all sorts of weird and wonderful permutations - still with the basics intact. It doesn’t need to be perfect - we all need a little adversity to build our resilence and equip us for life in the world, and parenting is certainly an ‘on the job training’ experience. Humans are at their most vulnerable when they are babies - they are completely dependant and they stay that way for longer than any other species. They rely on others to provide what they need and they have only the basics in terms of communicating what those needs are. They are also pretty robust when you think about how powerful the life force in a baby really is.

The nature of us too is that we are brilliant learners and we learn fastest through imitation. If we grow up in an abusive environment we will either perpetuate (adapt) or rebel against (break the patterns) of our foundation learning. Whether we grow to repeat the past or break free from it - we all seem to do a little of both along the way as we become equipped to find our own way in Life.

It will be a fascinating study to observe the Kahui dynamic as it evolves. Someone is responsible for two baby’s deaths. The people who know what happened are keeping silent. Money has now been introduced - contributed by a wider community who stands for the innocent children (or maybe is hell bent on bringing the ‘criminals’ to justice from a righteous place inside) - the community integrity is activated and it is spreading. There is a will for the pressure of money, to crack through to the truth. Will greed overcome whatever is maintaining the silence? Will someone out there be exploring their minds right now for how they could justify to themselves that it is now ‘right’ to tell the truth and collect? Are they bargaining inside to come up with a figure that would allow them do it - that would be ‘enough’? And if one is thinking this way, maybe others are as well - and will that provoke competition for who can get to the money first - a gamble to get the money - loyalty now out the window in an effort to ‘save one’s own skin’? Or will none of that matter and the truth will stay buried? Will the threat of it all coming tumbling down be enough to unite the players in this awful drama?

Yes it will be fascinating to see how this completes - I get the sense this matter will not rest until it is resolved. How can it?

When I attempt to move beyond my own sense of rights and wrongs and judgements that are pretty compelling and I attempt to make my own meaning of the deaths of those children (and so many others who have suffered and still suffer at the hands of terrible abuse), children who were and are part of my wider community as New Zealanders, when I look with evolutionary eyes, I can see only that they were and are angel children who gave their lives that we might open our hearts a little more, that we might learn something important - about ourselves. Those two souls, born into that family were and remain a gift to the whole whanau, and to all of us if we care enough, if we let it matter to us that there are people out there not well enough equipped to manage the sacred role of nurturing and growing baby humans, not mature enough to accept responsibility for their actions.

In my view it is inhumane to perpetuate the hate and derision for those who do not have the resources to do things differently. If the solution to child abuse is to build more prisons to house the perpetrators, are we not being deluded if we think this actually works to lessen or eliminate the problem? Doesn’t that just salve some part of us that wants retribution without dealing with cause? In my view the solution lies in education.

The current mentality - the punative response - seems to only breed more violence and hate and resentment - every which way we look. When we humans make mistakes and feel attacked (even if we ‘deserve it’), we can find it too hard to ‘own’ those mistakes and we instinctually defend instead. Who hasn’t defended themselves against the uncompromising nature of the truth at some time in their lives? We deny, justify, rationalise, attack and otherwise do psychological gymnastics in an attempt to suppress our conscience.

I can only feel compassion for the ones who carry this burden of knowing what they have done (and maybe continue to do), in the face of the visceral hatred of a community that supposedly knows better. It takes awareness of wrong doing to own up and face the music. It takes courage to be aware and own up in the face of one’s own fear of the response (in the Kahui case it would no doubt be the rejection of a whole country). How much courage and humility would one need to acknowledge what you know, live with yourself and feel the full force of community derision? I bet that family think of those babies every single day - how could they not?

Damage done, too late now to change it so how about spending the next multi-million dollar prison budget on educating parents and would-be parents en mass, assisting them to grow through their own unresolved pasts so they model something new to the next generation. There are brilliant organisations out there with the programmes that could really help that could reach so many more if they had the resources. If we want to stop the problem rather than create employment for more under-resourced prison officers and social workers, we are the ones who need to face the music and stop being distracted by seeking out who is to blame. It’s our community - it’s our responsibility. We all do our best with the resources we have, so let’s stop judging others for not having the resources we think they should have, and provide those resources in ways that are easy to access, hold no stigma, and learn from the deaths of all the abused babies - make their tiny lives meaningful, let them help us co-create stronger more healthy communities. All it would take is the vision of a new possibility and the will to make it manifest in our community.

And that’s it, from my view.
Amanda