Things I Will Not Do
Avoid visiting London. London is one of my favourite cities in the world, grime and noise and big-city frustrations and all. I have friends there, relatives there, ancestors there, memories there.
Avoid the Tube. Sure, it’s good to get out and walk through the city centre now and then, but how else are you supposed to get from Heathrow to the West End or Kings Cross to Clapham? Besides, London isn’t the only place with an underground: you want confined spaces, try Glasgow’s.
Avoid sitting on the upper deck of double-decker busses. I like the upper deck; you get to see where you’re going, you don’t have to compete with old ladies for seats, and making your way down the stairs is an adventure every time.
Treat all people of a particular appearance with suspicion. I’m a pale Caucasian with red hair. Twenty years ago, it could have been me getting sideways glances.
Treat all people of a particular religion with suspicion. If you’re a person of any religion we’ll disagree about certain things, and yet I’ve coped with that for all of these years. Religion rarely comes up in day-to-day dealings with strangers. When you’re off at church or the mosque, I’ll be somewhere else and won’t even notice.
Imagine that any of these responses is exceptional. It’s not the English stiff upper lip, it’s just common sense. Either you carry on getting around and interacting with others, or you sit in your room glaring at them through the curtains.
Claim that Iraq had nothing to do with it—or everything. This looks like part of a chain of terrorist attacks going back to the early ’90s, but these guys would have noticed what was happening in between. Only the aggrieved would do something like this, and the Iraq War may well have been one of their grievances. So what? That doesn’t excuse what they did.
Claim that it’s easy to remove their grievances. They must have been storing them up for decades, not just years. We can’t go back in time and fix the kids who ended up doing this. And even if some of their complaints are ones we too would regret or could prevent, what about those that aren’t? The motives of suicide bombers aren’t widely shared.
Accept every restriction of liberty in the name of security. This is a democracy; liberty is part of the package. The question is how much security we need, which liberties we’re prepared to restrict, and whether doing the latter will actually achieve the former.
Frame future posts in this convoluted double-negative way.
15 July 2005
I think this is a fantastic post.
Particularly agree with what you say about issue 4. I've been wrestling with my thoughts about who can expect to be suspected, and why this isn't fair, particularly since the mistaken shooting in London a few days ago. My brother is rather darker-complexioned than the boy who was shot, and has noticed that nobody will now sit next to him on the bus if there's a single other seat free. He's a dark young guy with a backpack. (We tell him it might help if he shaved more often.)
This seems particularly unfair as he's a medical student, so kind-hearted he has been known to stop the car to avoid driving over a snail, and doesn't have a single non-Scottish ancestor that we know of. But it isn't particularly unfair. No more so than looking askance at a young Asian guy with a backpack, who is (chances are) also a kind-hearted person who leads a blameless life.
And I like the top deck of the bus too.
Added by Kirsten on 26 July 2005.
Thanks, Kirsten. I'm sorry to hear your brother's running into that. If only people would turn it around and recognize that the chance of a random person of *any* background being a suicide bomber is much, much smaller than the usual risks we face every day.
Added by Rory on 26 July 2005.
Thanks, Rory.
Added by Kirsten on 27 July 2005.