Rosemary McLeod: No warm fuzzies over Blanket Man

So Blanket Man is dead. Now for the commemorative sculpture from Weta Workshop - I see the call for a sculpture has begun already - and the funeral attended by local dignitaries and those who used to feed him booze and junk food on Courtenay Place. They meant well but they didn't do him any good. He wouldn't let them.

Blanket Man did a slow suicide on Wellington's streets, dressed only in a loin cloth and blanket, for years, and for this he became the city's mascot.

Is it too late to make dangly effigies of him to hang from rear vision mirrors?

Am I cynical? Yes. The sight of Ben Hana, bedraggled and slowly dying, didn't inspire me. I didn't think, as one dignitary has remarked, that "he did it his way". I wondered instead about the world I live in, where a self-destructive scarecrow of a man can become an anti-hero, someone to mentally pat on the head for luck as you pass by, and even - this is where we were collectively quite mad - a tourist attraction, the local pet Maori.

I didn't have any warm fuzzy feelings about the spectacle he presented.

I felt angry, thinking about the marginalised people, all life's failures around us, who want so much and somehow can achieve so little, and how too many of them are also Maori. Don't throw pity into the equation. Pity, a soppy variation on complacency, is the last thing anybody wants to be on the receiving end of. No wonder he shrugged it off. Anger is what the downtrodden need, whatever gives them the energy to grasp hold of the only life they'll ever get, and make something positive of it that may actually bring some joy. This they won't get out of booze and marijuana, the addictions that were the focus of Blanket Man's life, and which killed him at the age of 54.

There is something weird, too, when ordinary people's response to an appalling crime is to tell TV reporters about their concern - not for the victim, but for the perpetrator. The sexual violation and beating of a 5-year-old child might have shamed the nation, but there they were, feeling good because they were not going to judge the accused, even if it turned out that he was guilty.

"We mustn't judge" has become the national mantra. We actually feel righteous about giving up on any belief in right and wrong, so we can simply feel indulgent about a public slow death from addiction and malnutrition, just as we draw back complacently from condemning a vile crime. We are, quite simply, morally lazy. It's too much effort to set our minds to the task of upholding what's good, and condemning what's not: we've fallen into the trap of believing that an explanation for abhorrent acts is in itself an absolution.

And now another baby has been killed. To our collective shame, the faces of dead children in the report this week were all of dead Maori children and it's a Maori baby, a 2-month-old triplet, who has just died in Wanganui Hospital. That's as much as we know about this case and we can't say any more than that.

I will say, though, that I know what it's like to look after babies, though at least mine arrived one at a time. I know about exhaustion, and what it's like to turn into a machine whose own wants and needs have to take a back seat to a small baby's if it is to survive and thrive. But I can't imagine having three at once - any more than I can understand wanting to kill one.

Let's hope that this latest case doesn't shape up like so many others, with alcohol and drugs as their common feature. What people take as a panacea for their problems all too often ends up - as it did with Blanket Man - to be their downfall. So where, exactly, is the heroism in that?