Shut Up And Mourn

As soon as word broke out of the attacks in France, my father turned to me and said: "Don't write anything about this. Don't say anything online."


I love my father dearly - even when he wakes me up whilst I'm trying to have a lie-in - but no. My blog gets on average around 30 views per week. Even if I said things that could be interpreted as radical, then no-one would care. But the only thing radical that I've ever said is: "the government is corrupt" and "human beings should be equal." The former is merely a statement of fact, and the latter is hardly a call for arms. If my blog is receiving unwanted attention then it's not my fault because I haven't done anything that may be interpreted as 'wrong' - nor do I plan to do anything that may be interpreted as 'wrong.' Sod off, MI5.

OK, maybe if you go through my posts I may have made an overly-generalised statement, or said something that wasn't sufficiently backed up. And that's fine. Please point that part out to me so I can go back and correct it. I want to be as good as I can at this whole writing thing considering it's the craft I've committed myself to. I don't always respond criticism, but I certainly listen to it. Only a jellyfish doesn't.

Never tell me to sit here in silence again, Dad. The whole reason why this state of affair continues is because either people don't know what's going on or choose not to act. The Refugee Crisis was caused by people not realising how desperate the situation in the Middle East and North Africa is until it's survivors are banging at our shiny white gates begging for safety. Hardly anyone seems to know about us arming Saudi Arabia so they can bomb innocent civilians in Yemen. ISIS appears so prominent that we forget at least a hundred different groups are claiming ownership of Syria - some of them are anti-Assad rebels, some of them are extremists. Of all this, it's still the Syrian government that's killed the most innocent lives.

But all politics need to be forgotten during this period of mourning. When you debate issues of democracy, they all seem irrelevant when hundreds lay dead. Hundreds of tragedies. Lying there in the road. So maybe my Dad was right. Maybe he didn't mean: "you need to stop trying to change the world for the better." Maybe he just meant: "Let the poor people be buried first."

So I will. Anything I say will tarnish the memory of the dead. Any excuses I make, any conspiracies or tactics I may hypothesise, any suggestions of what must be done now - that just soils the calamity of this situation. I'm reminded of funerals. I can't stand it when a priest warbles about eternal life, a new beginning, a memory never forgotten. Just shut up. Nothing you say will replace the part that's been ripped from my body. Every pathetic attempt to ignore this void makes me want you to get sucked up in it. I've been to three funerals in my time (that's three funerals too many) and every time I've wanted to throttle the vicar. Just let me have this moment in silence. I don't even want to think - I just want to feel this pain with everyone else.

I feel the same way about the victims in Paris. I don't know any of the dead. I've only ever been to Paris twice; both times when I was young. But the void is there again, and all I can do is sit here and feel. The rest of the world feels this too.

Well no. Right now I feel like the only one. There are priests dotted around, ruining this moment. From Donald Trump saying that he'll close all the Mosques to countless imbecile's saying that this is why we don't let refugees in. Many members of the government are now using this massacre to justify the need to spy on us; their twisted rationale being: "ISIS represents an attack on our rights and values. So we're going to strip everyone of their rights and values." And when politicians and other figures of authority aren't capitalising on this massacre to push their despicable agenda's upon us, they're getting up on podiums or updating their Twitter accounts saying: "I condemn these actions. They are wrong."

NO FUCKING SHIT!! Of course it's abhorrent to murder innocent people before blasting yourself into bits! What the fuck are you trying to prove? There's no point trying to score cheap points by saying this is wrong - because everyone with a functioning brain knows it's wrong.

And then there are just the people on social media saying "this is horrible." Of fucking course! This is like being stabbed in the chest and someone walking up to you saying: "that looks painful." The fuck are you trying to achieve?

Just shut up. All of you. We shouldn't have minutes of silence - we should have days. Weeks. Months. Clearly our dumb monkey brains can't cope with any kind of trauma, and so whenever anything remotely similar to the attacks in Paris occurs then we fill the world with such bullshit. Maybe my Dad's right. So I'm going to stop talking. I'm going to sit here and mourn in silence. I'm going to sit here until I find a reason to carry on writing.