Boom Town

The news filters in as fragments of rumour and reportage. We exchange messages of reassurance, and watch events unfold, and life goes on; except where it doesn't. We've been here before too often not to remember how the story plays out. Still, the texture varies, and this is the closest to home it's been in awhile.

Our leaders fall over each other to make proclamations of strength and defiance, ritually insisting that wickedness must fail, that such acts as these will never cow us. And they are right, really; for all the noise the bombs make, they are but little things, and even with the amplification of shock and outrage remain mere squibs. The city will sail on, majestically indifferent to their popping.

Terror cannot win if we are not terrified, and we are not. London is far bigger and far fucking scarier than a few small explosions. If we were going to succumb to terror we would have done so centuries ago. It is not in our nature.

But the bombers do achieve something, even so. They can claim this mean little victory: to have added to the sorrow of the world. Huzzah!

As if it needed any more.

There's plenty of mourning to be done, now, plenty of weeping. Dozens are dead, hundreds wounded. Lives broken, blood on the streets, horror in the dark. So many tears. Chalk that up, believer, score one for you.

But there is always mourning to be done. The world is full of grief, there's no fucking shortage of it. More people will die in agony around the globe as I type these words than were burned and choked and shattered in the tunnels this morning. Pain is a commonplace. Hurt grows on trees.

So, beyond the terrible sadness of the event, there is another: that there are human beings so stupid as to value this worthless currency; who think there is anything to be bought by yet more bloody misery.
Posted by matt at July 7, 2005 11:31 PM