The bombing in London this week was dreadful - not least, to my mind, because it was so cheap and nasty.
There seems to have been a downward scale in all this. 9/11 was the grand gesture, commandeering 747s and crashing them into landmark buildings. Bali was a single bomb on a huge scale, detonated in the back of a parked truck. Madrid was a series of smaller bombs, detonated on trains remotely by mobile phone.
And now, in London, we have - what? Small bombs on tube trains, and one on the top deck of a bus. It seems cheap and mean-spirited to me.
I could be angry, and many people are. I spent an hour arguing with a slightly drunk man about it on the train home last night. But I'm not so much angry as sad - sad that people can drift into a state where they no longer see members of the public, strangers, as other people, but as an abstract representation of everything they hate. How else could they go through with it, if they did not anaesthetise themselves in this way?
The best expression I can recall for the process describes Pharaoh's unwillingness to let the people of Israel go. He 'hardened his heart against them', it says.
That's just it, isn't it? These people have hardened their hearts. God forbid that we should do the same.
friendly_freak
I think that people can be that callous. I think I could, you could, if the world seemed to be against what was right. If I saw evil running the world, running the media, the evil leaders of impossibly powerful countries exploiting my country or way of life, then villifying me and my people and calling themselves "developed" and worse "rightious", then...then I would be in a place where I would hate the citizens under those leaders. I would be blinded to their innocence because their arrogance would disgust me. Their stupid lives which they feel is so more important to mine, to my peoples.
I wouldn't be evil if I thought this, just pushed too far by selfish society. We have to cater for others as well as ourselves, and respect others or this is what happens.
P.s. I find it quite humorous what you said about the "low budget" attack on London. I know it's bad taste to joke, but I have to agree the sense of scale was more exciting in 9/11. But then they always do things bigger over there.