Living Together

Another week and yet another tragedy has struck our shores. I've avoided writing about the terrorist attacks and the Grenfell Tower disaster. I like to try and keep the blog as light hearted as possible, but the news I woke up to yesterday and the social media response to it has played on my mind now for twenty four hours and I need to verbalise it. With this in mind, please bear with me as this may not flow particularly well and may become a bit of a word dump. I apologise now.


Over the past few weeks, our country has been battered and bruised. People are shocked and angry and do you know what? That's OK. That's a normal human reaction. When someone commits an act of terrorism, or allows people to live in dangerous situations, people have a right to be angry and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. They have a right to feel that natural, human emotion. What they don't have a right to do, is to direct that anger at innocent people and that is what we all awoke to yesterday morning.

Yesterday morning we woke to hear that a man deliberately targeted Muslims leaving a Mosque. He drove into them wanting to kill them. Thankfully, he was apprehended and will pay for his crime and rightly so, though how much of a comfort it will be to those affected is another story, because it should never have happened.

One of the things that has surprised me is the response to this incident on social media. Following the numerous Facebook posts relating to the previous three incidents, I have seen only two or three individuals say anything about this latest attack. Why? I don't know, but it's bothering me. These are people too. Yes, it wasn't on the same scale as the London and Manchester attacks, but I'm pretty sure that if someone mowed down a bunch of Christians leaving a church on a Sunday morning, it would be plastered all over social media. All the churches would be sharing posts encouraging prayer for the victims, as they did for London, Manchester and Grenfell Tower, but nothing (and trust me I've checked for them on my old church's website). To my mind it doesn't matter what someones faith, ethnicity, gender, age etc. when something like this happens we have to stand together. We have to offer support, even if it's only acknowledging it.

Once again it is another crime that didn't need to happen. These terrorist attacks are acts of hatred, born out of ignorance and intolerance. As individuals we each have a responsibility to educate ourselves and our children, that just because someone looks different, sounds different, or thinks differently to us,  it doesn't make them wrong or a bad person. We need to acknowledge that every community has good people and bad people, and not to judge the good folk on what the bad do. We have to learn it's not about me, but about 'we'.

Once we learn that 'we' need to come together and work together to break down barriers, perhaps 'we' can begin to build a better world for our children.

The fire in London last week was truly horrific, more so given that residents had raised safety concerns, but out of that tragedy we have seen the most amazing community come together. A diverse community. A community that is united, and not divided. A community that we should all aspire to be like, where people of all ages, faiths, ethnicities and nationalities stand side by side offering love, help and support to one another.