A week of feeling a little less safe..
The
week of April 15th 2013 will certainly be recorded as a memorable
one. What should have been a memorable week for good reasons began in tragedy
and ended in fear and many people feeling a lot less safe.
I was looking forward to this being the week we finally sad farewell/adieu and good riddance to Mrs Thatcher who has been a hero for some a divisive and unpopular figure for many more, especially in the area I come from.
The
Boston marathon bombing started the week off.
My thoughts go out to my friends in Boston. I lived there in 2000-2002
and loved the city, it was a slow burner for me but work took me there and as
my director said “be careful what you wish for”, it took time for me to settle
but only a very strict INS forced me to return to the UK and to a promotion
then redundancy. I could have easily stayed in a city that was only 1 hour from
New York and 6 from London. I made friends there and worked with lovely people.
The marathon bombings which were thankfully smaller scale than 9/11 put the
fear of god into Boston yet again. I was there on 9/11 and being afraid in your
own home is horrible. As I type this, one of the bombers is dead, and another,
his younger brother, is
in custody and injured. When bombings occur in places or at events we don’t
expect I think it makes us feel a little less safe? For months after 9/11 the sound of a plane
overhead made me shudder, especially when it was flying low over the city as
they do in London all the time, yet it never made me fear flying, in fact I
have flown more and further in the 11 years since 9/11 than in my whole life before
it. The things I’d gotten used to became scary. What the terrorists had failed
to do physically, they had achieved mentally. Now I am not the type of person
who now associates everyone Muslim or from Chechnya as potential terrorists but
these events make us less trusting of our neighbours and allow the extremists
on both sides to move in and preach fear and revenge.
In the middle of the week there were 2 other events one could be a happy event or sad depending on your political view, I was glad to see Mrs Thatcher gone and hope the harsher elements of her legacy die with her, no hope right now and her funeral and the syrupy coverage by the BBC etc. made it worse. She was talked off like a deity, the goddess of the right wing, the saviour of the country. Well anyone thinking she saved the country, go for a drive north, taking in the once great industrial cities of Coventry, Birmingham, Stoke, Manchester, Liverpool, Bradford, Leeds, Middlesbrough, Sunderland then Newcastle and see what evidence there is of this great job she did. You will not find it in my home town or the region I grew up in. You may find it in West London suburbs or the Home Counties which worship her but in areas that didn’t love her; she was a harsh leader and a destroyer of jobs and communities.
Mid-week
another community was almost destroyed, not by Mrs Thatcher this time; her
tentacles didn’t reach rural Texas. In the town of West
in Texas a massive explosion destroyed much of the town, the cause,
fertiliser and its ingredients. The footage of the explosion was amazing; it
was an epic explosion but a tragedy. The fact the explosion took place when the
nearby school was closed is a small miracle. The town will recover once the
cameras have gone and the FEMA operatives have moved on to the next disaster.
The blogosphere was alight with conspiracy theories all week, logical
considering what had happened in Boston but at the same time, ridiculous.
I learned this week to not fear fear, never to live near a fertiliser factory and that in societies and groups, especially in the UK and USA you are only one of them until they don’t want you. Then you are not.
Sean Usher
April 20, 2013
Comments
Post a Comment