#just saying. also i hate editing. if there are any more typos ill flip my lid. no-one tell me.

[lunarharp]

into the deep end - 29k T orufrey fic.

the sweet oblivion of the victim, the poisoned freedom of the other.

for one moment - it had felt like two parts returned - the needed reunion of two disparate halves. no more secrets, no more pain.

the moment you get to give back what you never wanted to take. that moment, under the night-blooming flowers, when they had both let out the same single broken sigh of relief.

but they were never whole to begin with, were they?

qifrey swore he wouldn't say 'sorry' to this man any more if he could help it - sorry is cheap now. he didn't want to be in a position ever again where you only have 'sorry' left. so he just looks down into the threads of his blanket, strains his eye until it hurts, feeling his insides - his throat, heart and head - burn with pain. he expects more, but olly says nothing.

olly says nothing.

[gaiatheorist]

‘Potential Terrorist Attack.’

I’ve left the quotation marks around it because that’s what the BBC have done. The initial news-notification on my phone, around 2am, so a couple of hours after the attack quoted ‘major incident’. It has taken the ‘balanced and impartial’ BBC roughly five hours to use the word ‘terrorist.’

The internet is, as the internet does, having multiple arguments about whether this is a terrorist incident or not. Yes it is. (There, fixed it for you, as the cool kids say.) The ludicrous phrasing of ‘clean shaven white man’ in the initial reports has set the ‘lone wolf’ cat amongst the pigeons. I can see today being a bit fractious.

Awash with speculation, and eyewitness accounts, 3am Twitter is rarely the most coherent or rational of places, everyone on my timeline will, no doubt, be making use of the ‘report’ function today. I looked at the hashtag, it’s what I do when ‘something happens’, and, in amongst the lucid condolences, and calls for unity, some people were saying it might just have been a drunk driver, or an accident. Nobody has raised the point that the man was detained for questioning, and not shot on sight. 

What a mess. The UK is already a tinder-dry powder-keg, and that’s not even taking into account the unseasonably warm weather, that will make some of us sleep-deprived and irritable.

It was a terrorist attack. It was a deliberate attempt to induce fear and panic. One death has been reported, and eight injured. The timing and location were deliberate, indicating that the attack was Islamophobic in nature. That’s the ‘twist’ that some hashtag users are struggling with. The version of ‘terrorism’ that they’re used to seeing is framed in the opposite direction, so they’re unable to reconcile this attack with the terminology.

Here’s the glitch in the system, white men can be terrorists, I suppose white women can, too, although we’re generally ‘trained’ to be less outwardly violent from birth. The Basque separatist movement had female operatives, as I recall, and, while I don’t remember any female IRA ‘names’, there was always talk of ‘terrorist sympathisers.’ 

This is the ‘contagion’ that the police spokesperson warned of, and this is another instance where it is absolutely clear that the Prevent strategy is under-resourced, and poorly directed. To flip-out to another angle, the mental health/suicide angle, very few people take their own lives without somebody noticing something was wrong, subtle behavioural changes, a trail of breadcrumbs for someone to pick up. That is not to infer that the man was mentally ill, it’s the point that someone, somewhere will have had concerns about this individual, and may or may not have attempted to report them. None of the Prevent referrals I made were linked to concerns of radicalisation, but that’s just my geographically narrow demographic. 

As more of the UK wakes up, and absorbs the news, more people will have opinions, and speculate. My prediction is that the tone will become unpleasant, that there will be racial slurs, and threats. That instability is what terrorists want, whatever their affiliation. All of the authority figures will call for calm, some ordinary people won’t be calm at all, there was already enough nervous tension in the air before this, we’re at another potential tipping-point. 

Whatever his skewed reasoning, whatever his affiliation or lack thereof, his intent was to cause harm. The rest of us need to do the opposite. 

(I’ve come back in to edit the typo, sometimes I’m that pedantic, but today I’m also waiting for the rental inspection, so can’t do anything that might generate mess.)

I’m struck by the difference in the response to this one, on the scene. There are reports that he shouted ‘Kill me’ and ‘I want to kill Muslims.’  I’ve just read another post, reported to be from one of the people attacked, cementing the difference between the reaction to this attack and the last one. The people leaving the mosque detained the attacker, alive, until the police arrived. There are other reports that the Iman from the mosque sheltered the attacker. Those are the details that the ‘send them back’ contingent won’t want to see, those actions are not consistent with their demonisation of ‘others’.

I can’t make any sweeping generalisations about any organised religion being one ‘of peace’, it doesn’t sit right with me; the actions of those Muslims, this morning, were profoundly peaceful. The London Bridge and Borough Market attacks had a different target, we awful Western-wasters, with our alcohol, and our unbecoming behaviours. Those people fought back, very ‘English’, get a few pints down us, and we’ll pick a fight with a hat-stand. As much as the last attacks were directed at ‘our’ way of life, in a way, so was this one. Whatever his reasoning, he was attacking the fact that we are an integrated society. 

Someone has just re-tweeted a ‘Helter Skelter’ comment, accusing the UK government of managing what Charles Manson tried to do, to set black against white in that example, to bring chaos and instability. That’s precisely what we don’t need, tensions are already close to breaking point after the Grenfell Tower fire, and some of us are incredibly uneasy about both Brexit, and the precarious nature of the current government. 

We’re only days beyond the ‘More in common’ events, held to commemorate the life and works of Jo Cox, who sought to bring communities together, to end this divisive rhetoric. We’ve had the calls for calm, and the calls for unity, I don’t want to dig into the responses, and I’m fairly sure the Tango-tan calling for a Muslim ban will have something to say about it. (Maybe along the lines of “If they weren’t allowed to come in the first place, they wouldn’t have been killed.”, like the kids I used to support in bottom-set Geography classes, who’d say “Why don’t they just move?” when we covered Less Developed Countries.) 

Right, on with it, I’m not going to look for hate-spouts to report, and I’m not going to get into arguments with them, that would be as effective as picking a fight with the hat-stand. If they float into my field of vision I’ll report them, whichever ‘side’ they’re coming from. It’s too hot, we’re all irritable, we’ve seen too much death, destruction and despair already, I don’t want any more.