Which speaks volumes of how things are there. The world's northernmost desert wind.
glad someone else said it. as a UK expat and one who has spent some happy hours in London the destruction grieves me -- not only the destruction of life and limb, but the destruction of the freedom of the city, more fodder for the lockdown state, the imminent end of the wonderful times I knew there 30 years ago.
it did occur to me as I read this thread and other news coverage... 37, 40, maybe 50 dead, 700 wounded, maybe more losses if some of the wounded don't make it... and I think about the half-million Iraqi children, and the daily death toll... 16, 20, 40 dead every day, day in, day out, and no one even counts the wounded. and Afghanistan littered with cute yellow cluster bombs and all the rest...
and awful though this feels to me on sentimental grounds, to see a city I love being harassed and vandalised and people murdered in numbers, civic order being shattered, ordinary people being victimised at random... I had that same thought: we've been doing exactly this to Iraq for, what, 20 years now? random killings, pointless violence? continuous bombing sorties, invasion, sanctions, more sorties, another invasion, towns flattened, thousands killed. London at least still has electricity, running water, a fairly trustworthy police force, hospitals with real equipment and well-trained doctors who aren't being kidnapped and murdered daily, working sanitation, working telephones... somehow my feelings of shock and dismay and horror and all the rest this morning only amplify and render more painful my personal sense of shame about what "we" have done to Iraq, as if a voice at my shoulder says, "If you feel this kind of distress and anger about this -- proportionately -- small incident, imagine what an Iraqi is feeling after two years of far worse." it is like the old saying about weeping that I had no shoes, and then I saw a man with no feet... I feel no less upset about London, just more upset about everything.
and hearing Blair and Bush immediately start trying to use it to sell their pig-headed profiteering WoT plus glorify the G8 summit as an heroic endeavour of the Truly Civilised under attack by the barbarian hordes... well it is making me feel ill. oh gawd. where to turn... and we are here as on a darkling plain / full of confused alarms of hurry and flight / where ignorant armies clash by night...
only grief. for all of us. The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
