Noble brotherly love in contrast to Bain circus

OPINION: It takes courage to be Michael Bain, if not the aggressive strutting type of a street fighter. Courage can be quiet and gentle, and rare.

Michael is the uncle of David Bain, famously convicted of killing his family, then acquitted this year at a second trial. Michael is the brother of Robin Bain, who died, with every member of his family, save David, in Dunedin in 1994. And last week Michael spoke out for the first time, in print and in person, to defend his brother (now the implied killer), to say Robin simply could not have done it.

You might think that this would not really take special courage, even that the world would quietly defer to the spokesman for a wider family, traumatised still by an appalling crime. You might also think that Michael would be universally seen to speak out in loyalty and love, and that this would be understood, even respected. But our world is not always generous, and we have not been kind to the wider family when its members spoke out in the past.

For daring to make a press statement supporting the police and justice system following David's first trial, when a campaign against the outcome began, some were verbally assaulted in person and subjected to nasty phone calls, and as a whole the family were viciously attacked on talkback radio.

They were shocked. People who had never met the dead family, and who did not know the living one, seemed to believe they knew better than they did. Yet strangers were still are in no position to know the whole truth.

We bully people into silence. We bully them when we claim to know all about their private lives and motivations, and judge them on the basis of our own beliefs and prejudices. We become bullies when we form vehement views about others in which compassion plays no part. And we are bullies when we forget the gentleness that grieving people deserve, and take them savagely to task.

More, we are thugs when we think we can take over the lives of ordinary people with lives ripped open by extraordinary events, and use them for our entertainment. That is why, when I saw again last week the television footage of the verdict being delivered at the second Bain trial, I was appalled as David's supporters broke into cheers and clapping.

A trial is not entertainment. It is not a play, or a sporting match in which we barrack for opposing sides. It is a quest for justice, and five people remain very dead. That is a sober fact.

We can all be wrong. Rebutting Michael's point of view last week, it was alleged that he had seen his brother fewer than six times in more than 20 years before the killings.

Michael can rebut that in detail; but the most salient one is probably that he, Robin and their other brother spent three weeks together at their mother's house in January 1994, painting it and repairing the roof for her, and that after a short break staying with their sister, Robin stayed with Michael on his way back home to Dunedin later that month. In June, Robin was dead.

It's only a detail, but it's more than a detail that none of the Bain family, nor the Cullens (mother Margaret Bain's family), have to Michael's knowledge ever been approached by campaigners on David's behalf to share their memories of the dead family members, or even of David himself.

Those memories might have changed nothing; the trials are behind us now; but it was a lost opportunity, and it doesn't take a lot of imagination to think of how you might feel in their position.

It is something to hope for, that you will never be the indirect victim of a serious crime that challenges all you have ever believed about your family, let alone that outsiders' eyes will ever dissect it, declare it lacking, repeat damaging rumours about it as if they are fact, or laugh at it. And it is something to pray for, that your private pain will never become casual amusement for a mass audience.

It doesn't matter whether Michael is right or wrong, or what you believe about the case because none of us fully knows what happened, and those who died can't tell us.

What matters is that a thoughtful, sincere man chose last week to declare his love for his lost brother and his family unflinchingly, in the face of public opinion and inevitable hostility. Call it what you like; impute sinister motives; attack if you must; but let none of us lose sight of the central fact that love is the best that can come out of anything, and it has to be worth defending.

- © Fairfax NZ News