About Yesterday….

Today, this was posted on an elist I belong to:

What is with all the drivel?
Most of us that are here in the UK take it in our stride and get on
with our lives.
We are fed up of the media stretching disasters into a week long
filling of a TV channel because they have nothing better to do!
🙂

To which I have just replied:

As it happens, I’m London-born and raised. I was glad to escape it –
it’s a filfthy, overcrowded polluted, thoroughly over-hyped city.
However, I’m now seeing on the TV scenes of streets that I know very
well (I spent my teenage years living just 100 yards or so from Kings
Cross station). I’m seeing tube stations and bus routes that I used
to travel on every day. They’re saying on the news that rescuers are
having difficulty reaching the worst carnage in the tube tunnel close
to Kings Cross because it’s so deep. Well, I know just how deep that
particular tunnel is because I daily went up and down on the two
*very* long escalators that reach it.
Yesterday, I felt that my family, my tribe, my people had been
attacked; I felt that my city (yes, that filthy, crowded Big Smoke
that I hated) had been violated. I hope that the vile creatures who
committed this mass murder are watching the tv and seeing just what
grief and pain they have caused.
If you don’t want to watch it, you are free not to do so. Just don’t
try to speak for me.

And I really have to repeat Ken Livingstone’s words:

This was not a terrorist attack against the mighty and the powerful. It was not aimed at Presidents or Prime Ministers. It was aimed at ordinary, working-class Londoners, black and white, Muslim and Christian, Hindu and Jew, young and old. It was an indiscriminate attempt to slaughter, irrespective of any considerations for age, for class, for religion, or whatever.
That isn’t an ideology, it isn’t even a perverted faith – it is just an indiscriminate attempt at mass murder and we know what the objective is. They seek to divide Londoners. They seek to turn Londoners against each other. I said yesterday to the International Olympic Committee, that the city of London is the greatest in the world, because everybody lives side by side in harmony. Londoners will not be divided by this cowardly attack. They will stand together in solidarity alongside those who have been injured and those who have been bereaved and that is why I’m proud to be the mayor of that city.