Ten shades of grey

‘it’s a sad, sad situation’ Elton John – Sorry seems to be the hardest word

Honestly, I’m gonna struggle with this entry. Not for what I may say, but that I may say something to upset someone, and that isn’t my intention. It just feels like, as always, this is the place to say this.

You can’t escape the date. It’s everywhere, on every tv screen, on every newspaper and on some people’s faces. It’s been called many things, not least ‘the day the world changed forever’, but somehow, not even that example seems right. I shouldn’t have to preface this entry with “what happened was a tragedy” but still, a year on, I feel I must.

But the truth is, that after everything, I still fail to see how everything is different. The NY skyline is different, there’s a whole in the ground in Pennsylvania, people were lost and for those that knew them, or knew someone who knew someone, yes things did change. But not for everyone. For me, it was essentially another day. As someone who grew up listening to terrorist stories on the news, someone who wasn’t allowed into Birmingham city centre on her own for years due to her mother’s fear that some attack would befall the city again, for me, it was another terrorist attack. It just wasn’t on British soil. If it had been, maybe I would have reacted the same as America, or maybe, and I hope that this more true, I would have asked why?

To watch the President of the USA declare war on terrorism made me think. Would he start in his own country? Stop the funding of the IRA (whether Real, Dissident, or whatever name they currently use)? It’s hard to take a statement like that seriously when you know that America have funded bombing campaigns in your own country, or that they helped the Taliban fight against Russia in Afghanistan, or that they backed Iraq, and Saddam Hussein, when he gassed Iranian citizens, or that Israelis kill Palestinians with American weapons. You don’t need to tell me that the UK is blameless, I know the failings of my own country quite well. No country is blameless in what has happened over the years of history.

We held a minute’s silence at work today. The second or third in the last four/five weeks. To me, the meaning of one minute’s silence has gone. Every other week a football game starts with silence whilst we remember someone else whose death made headlines. Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells, everyone in Britain knows their names, but few could name any of the other scores of children who die each year, most in their own homes at the hands of family. There’s no silence for the victims of Canary Wharf, the Birmingham pub bombings, Omagh, the innocents in Afghanistan, cos yes, there were some innocents in that country, it was only a certain few that the ‘Allies’ went after (and how many of them remain at large today, one year on?). And yet each one of them died needlessly for someone else’s cause, like the thousands in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

I leave you with a simple question. What did you think of when you kept your peace for one minute today? Me? The unnamed victims of terror, in all forms, not just the ones that made the headlines that crisp autumn day in September 2001.

Until there is a next time…

xx