What's the Point?
After spending much of the weekend keeping the media at arms length, I felt it was time to write something at least to empty my head of the thoughts swirling around about the mayhem unfolding all over the place.
On Saturday evening, England played Russia in a football match in Marseille, France. The night before the game, a number of English people fought a running battle with both French and Russian people in the streets around the football stadium. They vandalised the various pubs and bars nearby, and put as many of each other in hospital as they possibly could. At the end of the game on Saturday evening, the Russian fans inside the stadium let off fireworks, and then charged English families in the stands, kicking and punching adults and children while hurling racist abuse.
On Saturday night in Florida, somebody walked into a nightclub armed with a hand gun and an assault rifle, and shot 50 gay people dead.
What the hell is wrong with the world?
Almost as quickly as the above events happened, the apologists started spewing their usual excuses in all directions.
“Those people are not football fans”
“The shooter was a Muslim Extremist”
I could go on. I'm not going to – it will serve no purpose.
I guess I'm just getting more and more fed up with people in general. Everything is always somebody else's fault. Somebody else always has to be blamed. The “somebody else” is always a different religion, or a different race, or “not like us”. The reason the various rampages seem to happen is because one group of people don't agree with another group of people – about anything, or everything.
Here's the thing. People do all sorts of things when they believe they are doing the right thing – and people learn about “the right thing” from others who systematically search out those that might be most amenable to being told what the right thing to do or think is. And yes, of course I'm going to point fingers at everybody with religious faith.
You can't have your cake, and eat it too. You can't go around shouting that you believe in this or that, and then say you don't believe in that bit, or this bit. You can't suddenly express sorrow that the world has lost a number of people that you privately think shouldn't exist.
I'm going to stop writing, before this becomes increasingly bitter, and increasingly points the fingers at nearly everybody I know – both on the internet, and in the real world.
I can't even write “I wish everybody would get on with their own lives”, because in my mind a huge number of people will interpret that as “we can do what we like then – please excuse me while I go and buy a semi-automatic weapon, and mow down everybody who's views or morals I don't like”.
We did it once before of course – a thousand years ago. History books call it “The Crusades”.
Anyway. Enough bellyaching about the world at large. The only way any of this changes is if we all try to change it – and it's in the interests of very few to either take the risks necessary to make change happen, or to drop long held beliefs backed up by hundreds or even thousands of years of history.