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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