Saturday 19 August 2017

Simple, effective, deadly

and totally lacking in any sense at all.
What is the point of hiring a van and driving it through a crowd? What is the point of killing innocent strangers who have done you no harm - and may even be of your faith and beliefs? 
Why should a seven year old boy be missing in a foreign city where, I have to assume, he doesn't speak the language. Even if he does speak the language he is only seven. If he is injured as well then what he is going through must be so terrifying that it will affect him for the rest of his life. 
The Senior Cat had responsibility for a very big school once, the biggest of its kind in the state. It was in the middle of a "soldier settlement" - one of those well meant but disastrous social experiments that took place after the war. It was meant to provide employment for returned service men who wanted to go farming - or simply didn't know what else to do. 
There were,  understandably, a lot of mental issues among the returned men. It wasn't helped by some of the local people not being very welcoming at the start. 
When we arrived about twenty years after the war debt was high and mental illness was a real problem. There were many other problems too. 
And yes, it affected the students in the school. It still does. I was talking to one recently. We met by chance at an event which should have been enjoyable. He was looking tense and anxious. His brother, the eldest in the family, was back in psychiatric care - the result of  having been violently physically abused by their father  during one of his many episodes of  mental illness. 
Yes, sixty-three years later someone is still suffering the consequences of the war - someone who wasn't even born before it ended. 
There are plenty of other stories like that. The idea that a war is over when peace is declared and documents signed is nonsense. It is only a start to recovery.
I am wondering about this small boy and the trauma he and all other children present are going through. Even those who are not too badly injured and come from loving, stable homes are going to have "flashbacks". What of those who have lost a parent? What of those who have seen others die?
And all that is just a small part of the terror and trauma  children are going through around the world right now. There have been too many requests for help to set up communication assistance for children who have simply ceased to speak or find it difficult to say anything because of the horrors they have seen or have been found alone without a common language. Some of them will simply never recover to the point where they can be fully functioning. stable human beings again.
Why would you want to do  that to someone else?

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