Joe Hildebrand: Trying to make sense of the senseless

Sydney has been left reeling from a string of tragic events which at their very heart have the same root cause, writes Joe Hildebrand.

In just three days the three biggest stories of the year dropped like bombs across Sydney.

The first was a shockingly violent, meaningless and random attack that came out of nowhere.

The second was the result of years of plotting and intrigue by supposed political and media masterminds that collapsed in a farcical heap at the hands of a Federal Court judgment.

And the third was an ugly assault on a man of the cloth in a house of God that provoked an even uglier response from a mob of thousands.

These events seemed miles apart, physically, politically and psychologically. The first took place in the commercial heart of the eastern suburbs, the second at the elite legal epicentre of the CBD and the third on the struggle streets of Western Sydney.

Yet not only did each have a seismic impact of their own but they forged an unholy trinity of trauma that has left the city still reeling.

It would be easy to simply dismiss these events as a random run of bad luck – after all, we all know bad things come in threes.

But human beings aren’t built that way. We need to find meaning even in the meaningless. It is the only way we can find consolation and the strength to go on after senseless acts.

Thus throughout history people have seen earthquakes, floods and plagues as evidence of God’s anger and a challenge to be better humans. And even today parents wracked with grief will harness the death of their child to champion a noble cause so that others might not suffer.

Such responses might not be rational but they are undeniably righteous. More importantly, they are necessary. It is human alchemy.

Flowers being laid at the memorial for the victims at Bondi Junction. Picture: NCA NewsWire / David Swift

And it is vital to our very survival – if we could not make sense of senselessness and turn tragedy into purpose then what would be the point of us? What would be the point of community or civilisation or any good deed if we just accepted the injustice of fate without question?

And so the question looms heavy over this week of shock and sorrow: What does it mean? What can we learn from it? Where have we gone wrong?

As always there are cheap and easy answers and we have seen plenty of those already. Many are already casting a juvenile ideological lens over each of the three bombshells: That the Bondi attack was just another example of violence against women; that the Lehrmann verdict was proof we should “believe all women”; and that the violence in Wakeley was proof that multiculturalism has failed.

These at least provide the first thread of commonality: All are simplistic and all are wrong.

The Bondi attack, if proof of anything, is proof of the horrors of schizophrenia and the need to treat serious mental health problems seriously. Trigger-happy activists trying to link mental illness and misogyny are stomping on very thin ice, which I suspect they are too blind to even notice.

As for the Lehrmann verdict, Justice Michael Lee made emphatically clear in the first few sentences of his judgment that the “believe all women” and #metoo movement was the very antithesis of his findings. Indeed, he explicitly said that his ruling was for the reasonable and fair-minded, not the one-eyed ideologues.

As for the Wakeley church attack and subsequent mob uprising being a failure of multiculturalism, it is the very opposite of the truth.

If multiculturalism had truly failed in Australia, this incident would not be the gasping horror splashed across the front pages of every newspaper and leading every six o’clock bulletin.

For decades upon decades since the end of World War II we have been welcoming migrants from increasingly diverse backgrounds into our country, going from the White Australia policy to Italians, Greeks, Vietnamese, Lebanese, Chinese and Indian. Yet even after three-quarters of a century of this, an event like we saw on Monday night is profoundly rare and shocking.

Indeed, the last time we saw a text message go so viral and produce such a violent mob was almost two decades ago when thousands of white Australians rioted against random immigrants in Cronulla. How quickly we forget.

But tragedies and transgressions as we have seen this week force us to remember. And they reinforce the importance of remembering.

This is why we must make sense of the senseless. And herein lies the rub: At the heart of the Bondi attack, the Lehrmann case, and the Wakeley violence lies the same root cause.

Each was a form of madness. For the Bondi killer it was clinical madness, for the Lehrmann and Higgins camps it was ideological madness, and for the Wakeley attacker, and the mob that followed, it was fanatical madness.

The one thing that defines them all is defined by its absence: Sense, sensibility and common sense itself – ironically the one rare thing that Justice Lee finally delivered.

All of us – be it this week or a thousand other weeks – have at times been brought undone by such madness. We can rarely prevent it.

What matters is whether we spread it or stop it.

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Originally published as Joe Hildebrand: Trying to make sense of the senseless