OUR LIFE IN HORROR

It’s the 14th November, 2015, and I’ve awoken from a very private nightmare into a very public one. Once more, a small number of men  of violence have transformed a major city centre on a Friday night from a centre of bustling activity, celebration, and drunken idiocy into a blood-bath. I can’t say I’m numb, exactly. Not quite numb. Sickened? Scared? Yeah, a bit. I feel… outraged. Hurt. I feel like I’VE been attacked, somehow.

Which is in many important ways bullshit and selfish and narcissistic in the extreme. For starters, horror shows like this are happening all over the world every single day, and are not only not breaking, ‘we-interrupt-our-regular-programing’ type news - they’re not news at all. Because they’re happening Somewhere Else, often to people whose skin tone is darker than mine happens to be. And if you’re reading this and thinking that on any level, yes, you are right, and I own the hypocrisy, and am shamed by it. It’s perhaps the ultimate and darkest and most poisonous expression of privilege.

But it doesn’t change how I feel.

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