Talk about manipulation.  A youngster is photographed squatting in some earthquake shaken rubble.  As a result The Sunday Star Times front-page tends to make a tiny piece of Christchurch look like war torn Kabul.  It’s not; nothing like it, apart that is from the ever-present human vulnerability in the face of powerful forces.

Roger McClay and Andrej Schwaab faced powerful forces in their recent court appearances.  The first sentenced for white-collar crime and Andrej for run of the mill violence and mayhem. As in all human tragedy, vulnerability hangs heavy in courtroom rituals, a kind of cloying humidity that binds all the participants into relationships hard to bear or break free of.

Within that confused relationship tangle, we load up the justice system with unreal demands, wanting it to deal to our confusion and fear; expecting it to behave like our varying views of God, to be distant, close, unbelievable, right, fair or just downright punitive.

As the earth shifts at each sentencing, observers and participants alike struggle with the frightening inconsistency of human activity and our unfamiliarity with the rules of legal theatre, which sometimes leads us to say dopey things.

In that vein, the Dominion Post announced that the sentencing gap was widening between the powerful and powerless.  Although spared The Sensible Sentencing Trust’s usual vitriol, the normally measured Kim Workman, Director of Rethinking Crime and Punishment waded into Roger McClay suggesting he should have been made an example of.

Sanity was only restored some days later by Wayne Goodall’s thoughtful piece stating the obvious that the two cases were completely different and could not be properly compared.  While he would have hoped that the judge could have found a better sentence structure for the tragic Andrej Schwaab, Roger McClay had, according to the research, been sentenced appropriately.

Goodall also pointed out that uninformed claims about sentencing are symptomatic of the unbalanced debate around criminal justice, good for populist politics but responsible for creating an insane system we will eventually pay dearly for.

The story that lies underneath the dramatic headlines, uninformed comment or manipulative photography is not about how many buildings have tumbled in Christchurch or even how tragic Andrej Schwaab’s life, or his fellow 10,000 inmates, has been.  The real story is about our vulnerability as human beings and how we deal with that.

Somehow in our development across time we have decided which kind of human vulnerability is acceptable and which is not.  What sort of human vulnerability will lead us to nurturing behaviour, where we’ll all pull together (PM’s included) to dish out hot meals and fluffy blankets and what sort we will shun.  When we head down this path of avoidance, we tend to use every punitive method we can think of to keep the shadow side away in the forlorn hope that we will remain safe from harm.

Crazy though it may seem, opening ourselves to more vulnerability, not less, is an important part of building a better world.  Being vulnerable is when we are most likely to face the reality of the world and our own selves.  When we are bare, shaking, frightened and stripped of our pretensions is when compassion for others and ourselves can grow, just before we rush don the body armour again.

There are no categories of vulnerability however hard we try to make it so.  There is just the human condition in the face of forces beyond our control.  One ancient religious response is to suggest that under those circumstances God is only able to be visibly present in the world because of the way we act.

May that very vulnerable God have mercy on us all.

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