Fear in London

Remarkably we were away as luck would have it during the two recent London bombings and only received the news second hand from local concerned parties. It certainly hit Londoner’s hard and this usually confident cosmopolitan city has become nervous and concerned in their aftermath. Personally I feel quite distant from these sentiments, not just because I was absent but also because I am not working at the moment so I am not experiencing the false bomb alerts, travel disruptions and sharing those nervous glances at every suspicious character on the tube with my fellow commuters every day. It doesn’t mean I don’t care, its just that I’m not as connected to it as some others and I think that gives me a more reasoned perspective. I do find it disturbing; the way that the government agencies and the press prefer to stoke the fear rather than spread calming sentiments. They remind me of those television advertisements for house-hold cleaners that imply that women are bad mothers if they do not disinfect their homes with the latest cleaners, claiming that there are dangerous germs lurking in their homes in every corner like cold-war agents of the communist empire waiting for every opportunity to destroy your family. I suppose that they, like Proctor and Gamble have something to sell and that makes me suspicious of their motives. Not only their motives but that the only suspect to have lost their life at the hand of the authorities in this hunt on the “war on terror” was an innocent Brazilian electrician (de Menezes). To me the presented explanation that it was an innocent police blunder simply doesn’t entirely hold water. Particularly as they are so strenuously impeding an enquiry, have fabricated witness statements and have treated the de Menezes family so appallingly on their arrival in London. It would almost make sense if they were say Saudi, but they are Brazilian. This seems to me to be a diversion to take everyone’s focus away from the actual bombings and the many questions that they pose. Particularly the considerably more effective first strike.