World Gone Crazy

If I was a clinical depressive, being held together by a combination of drugs and a loving family and friends, the last few weeks might have been very hard to take. Oh, wait. I am and they have been.

I am not finding it easy to find answers to what is going on around me right now and I am not alone. Social networks show people crying out, asking what the hell is going on, wondering why we live in such a messed up world. But people like me, people like my friends in the real world and on social networks, cannot possibly comprehend the world’s seemingly steady descent into chaos and disorder.

I was just getting ready for bed last night when news came through from Nice of a terrible accident. As I listened to the radio, it was beginning to emerge that this was no accident. It was no coincidence that it occurred on Bastille Day, either. How could it be?

France has been on the receiving end of some terrible attacks in the last few years. Charlie Hebdo, the attacks at the Bataclan and other places in Paris and now this. My heart aches for the people of this great country who are living through an ongoing and never-ending nightmare. But it’s not just in France, is it?

Recently, Ataturk airport in Turkey was attacked, so was Belgium. It was not that long ago we in this country were under attack on 7/7 and more recently the brutal murder of Lee Rigby. Nowhere is safe anymore.

Just last week, I was in the Netherlands. Mostly, I did not think about the terrorism threat, except when I was in bustling Amsterdam, for absolutely no reason at all, it must be said. It would have been very easy, I thought, on more than one occasion, for a fanatic to cause carnage very quickly. Last night, that carnage occurred in Nice.

I suspect the fascists of ISIS would be happiest if all muslims were blamed for last night’s apparently murderous attack, but that would be a travesty. No one suffers more from the actions of islamic fascists than muslims themselves. Yes, I know that most of these atrocities have been carried out by so called islamists and yes there are major issues with radicalisation. I am not going down the road of attacking all muslims for this, not least because we do not yet have the first idea why and how this latest attack occurred. Keep calm and wait for the facts.

Believe it or not, I do have first hand experience of terrorism. One night in 1974, some friends and I were headed to Tiffany’s nightclub to hear some heavy rock music and to enjoy some underage drinking. Some 10 minutes after our bus passed through Park Street, two IRA bombs went off, one in the doorway of Dixons near the top of the street. 10 minutes separated us from what could have been tragedy. We did not find out what had happened until we were making our way home, finding that buses had been cancelled (ours), meaning that we had to walk from Clifton all the way to Brislington, but when we learned the timings, we shivered. It could have been us.

This relatively minor terrorist attack, where no one was killed and only a few people injured, has stayed with me ever since. I remember when the IRA continued its murderous attacks in Northern Ireland and mainland Britain and every single time a bomb threat was made there was Park Street. If an event like this, some 42 years ago, should continue to have such an effect on me, imagine how an attack like the Bataclan or Nice will play on the survivors today?

Sadly, this situation is not going away anytime soon. There are some 11,000 people on French watch lists. Only one, a truck driver or someone with a Kalashnikov, as in Sousse, needs to succeed. Our security services need to be right every time, the terrorists need to get lucky just once.

I am not going to even try to get my head round this right now. What it is that inspires someone to drive a truck at innocent people, to gun down holidaymakers on a beach, to fire indiscriminately at concert goers? And what the hell inspires bystanders to stand there filming the chaos as it unfolds and then upload the images to social networks? It seems the sickness does not end with the terrorists.

Worst of all, if anything could be worse, is that children were killed. Children. And what of the children who survived? If I am still remembering a relatively small innocent from 1974, how will the children grow up as we say normally? How much counselling will be needed to make sense of something that makes no sense?

My heart aches and part of it breaks for the victims and survivors, the families and friends, the French people who are suffering so much right now.

I cannot see how this will ever end, such is the nature of this mayhem. Of course we need to carry on, but in a world gone crazy. Will things always be like this?