11:00 - 09 July 2005
'It happened against a backdrop with
which we are so familiar - the red London bus, the Tube signs' T was sad,
despicable, terrible and horrific - take your pick of the adjectives that now
pepper Britain's newspapers and our national conversations. Even those of us who
were immersed in the reporting of the terrorist attacks on London will have felt
our emotions surging once we had departed our offices for home. Until such time
we exist in a curious vacuum in which the professional demands of recording and
reporting the events prevail.
Afterwards - well, what afterwards? The mournful strains of Mahler were
playing on Radio Three as I drove back to the house and, while usually I would
switch over - not in the mood after a tiring day - this time I drifted. I came
close to ramming the car into a junction as my own sadness for those people in
London, their agony, shock and heartbreak, welled up.
It was not just the immediate victims of this carnage who concentrated my
thoughts. Not just those unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity and witness
the aftermath.
I thought as well of those who would survive but whose lives would ever
after be changed utterly. In the coming days we will read in poignant detail of
those who lost their lives, their work, their family life, their passions and
hobbies, and the warmth of their worlds - their worlds, like ours, so ordinary,
yet torn apart. We will see their photographs gazing out at us and wonder at
what lies beneath. What we will not see and can only guess about is how the
shock of this day will be carried like a cargo by so many others, or how it will
be felt in five, in ten or 20 years to come.
I thought of this and then, well, something else. How did this happen? Why
did this happen, if ever there can be a why to such cold-blooded and
indiscriminate carnage? What force of hate ran through the nerves and minds of
those who planned and orchestrated these attacks, what god-fuelled visions, and
what simplistic and frenzied ideas about those who mere hours or minutes before
may have been walking past them, sitting before them, pedestrians and commuters,
the broad-brush of race and creeds and beliefs?
Then I remembered how often we had been told that such a terrorist attack
was "inevitable", or predictable. We shrugged it off as we slunk back into the
comfortable routines of daily life.
Now, the cruel and savage world about which we read and we see on our TV
screens - always far away and always at an anaesthetising distance - had come to
London. At least 50 dead as I write this - and each life a precious and
irreplaceable universe. And it happened against a backdrop, a cityscape, with
which we are so familiar: the red London bus, the Tube signs, the bustling
metropolis. 50 dead, I wondered - but isn't that, sorry, just one bad day in
Baghdad? Do they die and suffer as did those people in London on Thursday
morning? If so, how come we hardly notice or allow it to slip into the
background of our normality?
I recalled the Iraqi speaker I had heard in Edinburgh last Saturday who
described, as a witness, the devastation of the blitz of Fallujah. And I
wondered - what of the people in the streets beneath that onslaught?
What of the 100,000 dead - how many, we cannot tell for sure - and what of
the warnings, such strident warnings, that the world was watching and the war
would feed a violence and a religious fanaticism that would inevitably come back
to haunt us?
Is there a hierarchy to the value of human life? To those who enacted this
atrocity in London, whoever they were or to whatever extremist sect they claim
allegiance, this surely will have been small "payback", a reciprocal terror for
the extraordinary and similarly indiscriminate slaughter of the War on Terror.
It is to declare - we can do this to you as well.
It will be incitement for retaliation that will further accelerate the
dehumanising cycle of overwhelming violence. It too will be a call to arms, to
be celebrated in ghettos of religious fanaticism across the Middle East.
Surely there is little we can do to thwart people who are so wide-eyed with
religious fervour and the certainty of a "martyr's" afterlife that they will
happily sacrifice themselves along with all others around them.
But this is a monster that is in no small part of Western making.
If the world shifted on its axis after the tragedy of 9/11, it is because
we allowed it to be so. We allowed our governments to make it so. If Britain is
changed by what occurred on Thursday, and propelled yet further down that
destructive course, it will be similarly so.
Remember, as we pore over those newspaper images of the people who died,
and read the anguished detail of how all they have been and all they could have
been was extinguished in minutes, in seconds, that they are victims to add to
the many more.
Sad, despicable, terrible and horrific could describe what happened to them
all.