Wednesday, 24 May 2017

Am I Albedi?



Manchester has been horrific. An attack aimed to maximise damage to young people enjoying a peak event in their short lives, designed to rip heart and souls out of community and country (though history shows communities and countries to be made of stronger stuff): this is the face of evil.

Ariana Grande brought together a group of thousands of people with hopes and dreams and joy and excitement, and someone with a soul full of hate stole the lives of 22 of them, smashed the bodies of 60 or more, broke the hearts of those whose loved ones did not come home, bruised hearts and souls of every person who will look on the photos, or more poignantly clutch the memories of eight year old Saffie Rose Roussos, eighteen year old Georgina Callande, twenty-six year old John Atkinson … to name only those whose names are so far released.

Nothing should deaden the horror we will feel as those events play out on our pixels and plasma, smart phones, televisions and newspapers. 

Nothing except time, and clutter, and a universal predisposition towards attention deficit syndrome. 

Few media sources will cite for long the story of  homeless man Steve Jones pulling the nails from the faces and bodies of the injured, certainly not for long enough to remember that those on the streets of our cities have hearts and souls, too.[1]

For those who have held the hands and hearts of the dead and injured time will be long. For the nearest loved ones of the dead time will be lifelong. But within a week most of us will have moved on,  angry perhaps, but newly fixated with the latest gaffe of Trump or the rise or fall of shares. 

For those who held the hands and hearts of Saffie and Georgina and John and the others dead or wounded, and for those like Ariana Grande who were present and for whom hatred and death has come far too close, the scar tissue will never completely heal. 

With beautiful honesty and simplicity Ariana Grande found exactly the right stuttered words: “broken. from the bottom of my heart, i am so so sorry. i don't have words.”

But wait. 

An hour ago (as I write) four were killed and sixteen injured in a Homs car bomb attack.[2] They remain nameless  to you and to me. Someone’s child: dead. Between last July and January 114 civilians in were killed, countless more looted, raped and tortured, in and around Yei in South Sudan. Nameless to you and to me. 

Their torment probably never troubled our pixels. I had to dig these awfulnesses out of the bowels of Al Jazeera

Dig them out because, well, not Global North. No names, no faces, no news of the world. Because Sudan. Because Syria. Because compassion fatigue. 

I can dwell only parenthetically on the millions starving yet again, in Kenya, Nigeria, Somalia, Uganda, South Sudan and Yemen as the worst drought in history sucks the life out of 20 million people. 

Mr Trump, I think, didn’t visit Yemen. Arms sales to Saudi Arabia are so much more attractive. 

Hundreds of thousands of refugees. The global north will purchase more razor wire and watch more news about Mr Trump’s wall.  Who manufactures razor wire? Shares will soar.
This week footage emerged of a woman abusing a Muslim family on a Virgin Australia flight to Fiji.[3] “You’re a fucking Muslim,” the woman declared to a nearby passenger, and pushed her own young child away when he attempted to silence her.

When cabin staff attempted to intervene she exploded: “Are you fucking kidding me? I’ve done nothing wrong. I’m sitting here,” and added for the benefit of the person  with the camera, “Keep recording. I’m going to knock her out. So you’re not worried about those that chop people’s heads off? Wow.” No stereotype there. Virgin Australia, it is reported, have banned the woman for life. 

Abuse on a plane to Nadi, death and mayhem at a concert in Manchester, detonation of a car bomb in Homs, rape in Yei: what have they to do with you or me? “I’ve done nothing wrong.”

The poet writing one of the biblical creation accounts describes humanity as “made in God’s image.” Let’s not argue now over the existence or otherwise of God, the divinity of Christ, the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin. It’s a metaphor, okay? A striking one. I will flag disagreement with philosophers who argue there is nothing distinctive about being human, but that’s about all. 

But let’s wonder  if we care about Manchester. Let’s wonder, too, about our scale of care.
Manchester, Homs, Yei.  

What for that matter would be the final word of the children from a Muslim family on a flight to Nadi when an angry, allegedly drunk white Australian woman yells “You’re a fucking Muslim” at me or my family? Because if my response to Manchester is hatred, then the hatred that was in the heart of Salman Abedi, the Manchester bomber, has the final word.

There has been, since Charlie Hebdo, a net-chic fetish for declaring “je suis …” 

Declaring, and feeling better. 

Suddenly there was not only je suis Charlie but je suis Nigeria (after Chibok) and je suis Diesel and numerous other feel-good pixelated fantasies. Only Malala Yousafzai  had an excuse, and she preceded all of the pixelated fantasies. 

Je suis Manchester? But what if I’m not? Je ne suis pas Manchester.

What if I’m not even Steve Jones pulling  nails from the faces and bodies of the injured;  what if I have become Salman Abedi, so poisoned with hatred that I maim and kill young concert goers. Or I am the unnamed Australian woman yelling “You’re a fucking Muslim” at a fellow passenger?

What if I become who I already am, rating the deaths of young people in a malicious Manchester bombing as more worthy of my grief and my news-attention than the theft of lives in a malicious Homs bombing, or the deaths of millions in a human-generated drought (or at best ignoring them with the flick of a remote control), or the deaths of refugees on international waters and in holding camps? 

What if hate, not love,  nonchalance, not action, is the final word in my life?

Is nonchalance better?

Perhaps the woman on a flight to Nadi might be us all. “Are you fucking kidding me? I’ve done nothing wrong. I’m sitting here.”

For Salman Abedi no excuse. What he perceived to be martyrdom in the name of a cultic distortion of Islam became  everything. But must that be the final word?  What if we are so filled with resentment because we live in a leaky terrace and we see hatred so embodied in social narrative leadership (“ban Muslims”, “get him out of here,”  “build a wall, “You’re a fucking Muslim”) that hate, not love, fear, not hope, nonchalance, not action have the last say?

I am Salman Abedi. Salman Abedi is me. I am a woman on a flight to Nadi. She is me.  Because nonchalance. Because darkness. 

Nonchalance, hatred, darkness. To ensure darkness  is not my epitaph I must seek light, action, love.  I must ensure that in the life-transactions of my every  day I strive to find harder equations of love, forgiveness, grace, hope (indeed all those attributes that St Paul called “fruits of the Pneuma”) and make them my final breath.  

Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.


[1] http://metro.co.uk/2017/05/23/i-had-to-help-its-just-instinct-homeless-hero-pulled-nails-out-of-childrens-faces-6657008/
[2] http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/05/syria-suicide-car-bombs-hit-homs-city-damascus-suburb-170523085410468.html
[3] http://www.9news.com.au/national/2017/05/23/16/10/virgin-flight-racist-rant-muslim-sydney-family

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