As I waited for a bus on Amiens St. this evening, I heard sirens and, a few seconds later, saw police motorcycle outriders flank a green Army Bomb Disposal Unit trunk on it’s way south. My first thought was “probably just a false alarm, people are a bit jumpy after London”. In the second or so before this thought sufaced though, I felt a sickening chill run through me, a feeling that something very bad had happened. Thankfully, whatever incident brought that truck onto the streets was so minor that it hasn’t made the news. An unattended bag and a nervous passer-by, or some such. That first few seconds will stay with me though.
I sometimes make a mental distinction between the political and the human. I’ll try to illustrate it by saying that some people would never fall out with friends over politics, and some would. I prefer the ones who wouldn’t, and deeply distrust the ones who would (ironically for people of such integrity, I tend to distrust their politics too). Fundamentalists and terrorists obviously fall into this latter category, but they’re not the only ones.
The same division can usually be seen in reactions to attacks like todays. Where the only decent reaction is the queasy shiver, the reflexive sense of dread, some people would rather skip over all that human suffering horseshit and get on with some rhetoric and pointscoring. The bodies weren’t cold on 9-11 and people were talking about “chickens coming home to roost”. When children -children, for goodness sake – were shot in Beslan, I saw blog-postings telling me how the terrorists had legitimate grievances.
Richard Delevan and George Galloway are only two examples of this tendancy, and they have more in common than one might think (Actually, I think Delevan has all the reactionary zeal of a former Trot, so who knows?). Not for them to pass up a chance to get self-righteous. They would do well to concentrate on that awful feeling in the pit of their stomachs, not the tinny buzzing in their little brains.
The people who commited today’s bombings placed their beliefs above their humanity. I invite certain people to ponder that.