I was born in Belfast and had a great childhood; I remember a seemingly endless stream of afternoons walking home, playing in the garden and spending time in my friends' bedrooms playing soldiers.
Of course, we also had real soldiers on the streets at that time. Walking home from school we would count the bomb explosions we had heard that day. We complained my friend Vincent's mother called us from football in her garden because she did not want us killed by stray bullet from the gun battle between the IRA and the British army half a mile away.
We lived with it and we dealt with it.
So why think of this now? As most people know, there were bomb attacks in London this July. Around 60 people were killed, several hundred were maimed and injured. This was a wholly reprehensible and cowardly act of terrorism aimed at killing inncent men and women and children.
Last Tuesday, I was flying back with a colleague to the UK from Amsterdam on a very crowded flight. My colleague had to rearrange some of the bags in the overhead lockers to enable him to fit in his own briefcase. A young man with mediterranian looks and a non-English accent said "Be careful - I've got a bomb up here."
It was, apparently a joke. It was also, by some magnitude, the most crass and thoughtless thing he could have said.
Especially on a plane.
Especially on the way to London.
He was immediately upbraided by the angry Englishman sitting beside him who complained that his 'joke' as offensive, probably illegal and almost certainly sufficient to justify his being thrown off the aircraft and arrested. He was probably correct.
He was joined by the woman in the seat in front who also claimed offence and said that she had been on one of the bombed trains and it was no laughing matter. She also was correct.
The man who had made the remark, to his credit, immediately realised that he was in error. He immediately made a fulsome apology.
If that had been the end of it, then I should not have thought to mention it here. But it was not.
The two who were offended did not leave it alone. For the next 20 minutes, they loudly and persistently lectured him about his remark, about how insensitive it was, and how they continued to find it offensive.
After about ten minutes, another passenger, a Dutchman, seeking peace, asking them to desist. The man had made a mistake, he had apologised, could they not let him be? The Englishman immediately rounded on this peacemaker, pointing his finger, and saying loudly that as he was not English, he had not been in London when the terrorists attacked, so he could not understand and should leave well alone.
Eventually, the tirades faded but the atmosphere remained brittle for the rest of the flight...
This hapless, tactless man from another country had become a lightning rod for the frustration and prejudice of the English. So they let rip, working themselves up into a froth - and, no doubt, increasing the ire of their victim.
The goal of the terrorists has now been fulfilled. Their success lies not in the atrocities they commit, but in the scale of the response they induce. Look at 9/11: a serious attack on New York by a few, unrepresentative fanatics induced a hugely disproportionate response from the US in Afghanistan and (especially) in Iraq. More than 60,000 people killed - most of whom are innocent civilians. Result? Two countries full of people who hate America and want nothing more than to attack her. From a few fanatics to countries full of antagonists. That is the goal of the terrorist: unreasoning, emotional, visceral response - creating a post-hoc justification (in their eyes) for the terrorism that provoked it.
And in that plane from Amsterdam I witnessed the same thing in microcosm.
And I thought again of Belfast. The fires of war there were fuelled by sectarian bile and the accelerant was the theatrical anger blustered on the television and the pulpit. But the peace - the fragile peace that we now clutch with brittle fingers - only became possible when those who had the chance to disport their anger chose not to do so and, instead, sat down to talk.
So, while I did indeed dislike the passenger's thoughtless remark - I disliked more the, yes, theatrical anger of his two complainants - for down that path lies perdition.
But hope still remains - in Belfast, the peace holds and fitfully grows stronger.
- Drib
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