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Tell you what, when I saw the latest migration statistics this week and the net 47,000 New Zealand citizens who’d decided to move overseas in the last year, I had an instantaneous reaction.  

You sure about that? I wondered. I know our economy isn’t exactly thriving, but have you checked any news headlines lately?  

Israel had just bombed Qatar. Russian drones were being shot down in Poland. The British government was in disarray. Charlie Kirk had just been assassinated.   

Put it this way: a sustained economic malaise isn’t half as bad as some of the other problems facing the world right now.   

You know how when there’s a really big news event it’s all anyone wants to talk about? As terrible a week as it’s been for the world, it’s been even worse on social media. A great week, nay, a vintage week for bad takes. 

Tom Phillips is a prime example. To think, even for a moment, that a man who’s been using his children in armed robberies, who’s deprived them of any outside social connections or formal education, who’s kept them in horrible, cold, dirty conditions and then ultimately exposed them to a Police shootout, to think that guy is misunderstood or is some kind of hero shows our species perhaps isn’t as developed as we’d all like to think. 

The Charlie Kirk assassination social media fallout was maybe even worse. His death really affected me. I’ve been following Charlie Kirk for years. I saw him speak in person when he first came to significant prominence at the Republican Convention in 2016. His assassination has been one of those moments in which it feels like we’re watching a global superpower decline in real time. The video was everywhere, multiple angles of a father being shot in the throat in front of his family, reposted, retweeted, re-upped. The algorithm feeding a bloodlust. And then the profound division. Incredible bad faith takes on both sides of a political and cultural chasm. People openly celebrating his murder, others neglecting the ways in which they have excused, minimised, or ignored political violence in the recent past.  

I truly think social media is responsible for some of worst aspects of our fraying world. It takes the worst parts of our nature as a species and acts a force multiplier.   

And yet, it retains the capacity every now and then to pull off something great. A terrible week for the world ended with a bit of goodness on the Golden Bay Community Noticeboard Facebook page, last night. 

Back in July, epic rainfall at the top of the South Island dislodged a bench from its spot next to the Takaka River. It was a memorial bench, heavy timber, beautifully crafted to remember a young man named Jack who passed back in 2018. But yesterday, Mum forwarded a post on Facebook through to the family chat.  

Jack’s bench had been found! After being swept away in the flooding, it had travelled the six or seven kilometres down the Takaka River and into the ocean. Then, over two months, it had somehow navigated the roughly 160kms from the river mouth, across Cook Straight, around D’Urville Island, to wash up, albeit with a few barnacles, on Waikanae Beach on the Kapiti Coast. 

Crazy! Amazing! But how to get Jack’s bench home after such an epic journey?   

“I’ll do it free of charge, get in touch,” said someone called Steve.   

A little faith in the world, restored.