Well yeah, London got bombed. As I'm sure you know by now, if you don't then you should go have a look at the
BBC, although the likelyhood of it not being common knowledge in the British Isles that London got attacked by terrorists is pretty low, not like here. Very few people over here seem to give a shit really, they don't really care. It'll take a bombing of a Hong Kong landmark like the MTR or the Peak Tram before the Chinese Nationalistic fervour gets going and God help us if it ever does. There'll be no "Maybe we shouldn't invade Iraq" or "Blair is a liar!" There'll just be a lot more dead people. But as it is now, it's a bit surreal here because you say to people "Did you hear about London" and they say "No" then you tell them and then they go "Oh" and then they change the subject and two seconds later they're laughing maniaclally about something inconsequential. I suppose it makes sense, we are thousands of miles away and the news coverage is pretty sparse but I suppose I would have thought that more people over here would care. It's pretty weird to be freaked out when no-one else seems to be.
So yeah, I'm kind of at a loss as exactly what to say, I hope everybody I know is okay, although I still don't know. The thing I do know is that quite a number of people are not okay and that is completely horrific.
The six degrees of separation thing means that the likelyhood is that I at least know someone who knows someone who was involved, the internet is full of reports of people like
this who are trying to keep it together to whatever extent that they can.
Personally, I was supposed to be going to drinks with a Christopher and a bunch of other people from the British Consulate last night to celebrate London's winning the Olympic Bid, I was really looking forward to it, everyone was but that was obviously downplayed as most of the people involved had to go and talk about things that were slightly more pressing than getting drunk.
It's funny, my opinions on terrorism have always been slightly between the two majority views, pro-war and For Bush and Blair and anti-war and against them. I've never really known how to really articulate them until recently. I'm anti-war but pro-peace, and before you think otherwise they're not the same thing. I don't want war, I want peace, but the reality is that no matter how you look at it if we're not at war now we soon will be. The majority of people out there who are pro-war have no idea what they mean by that statement, and equally true of those who claim to be anti-war. People usually just pick whatever knee-jerk, peer supported crap that suits them and then go from there, spreading division and hatred because of their ignorance. If you don't agree look at some of the ridiculous cardboard cut dogma that instinctually came out of the mouths of people from both sides, here on the
right and on the
left less than a day after this all went down. People are so ready to see enemies where there are none, even in each other. I mean, I might differentiate myself from some gun toting crazy in America or some irresponsiblly Anarchistic moron in Britain but that doesn't mean that people who want to blow up Westerners do. I think that the time has come to really stop hating each other and start hating the people who are doing this to us, whoever they are. The worst thing about the crap that both sides are sprouting is that on both sides, some of it is true, we do need to be vigilent, but we also have to recognize that the policies of our collective governments seem to be involved in the problem. If we don't all start realising that there are no all knowing goods or all hating evils and that we just have to work with what we have most of us will end up being destroyed by a maniac with a nuclear weapon, be it one or thirty thousand. Jesus, I hate political rants, they're always so stupidly fucking reactionary. Like this one I suppose..
