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12
Jun
2017
You’d think that Londoners should be inured to terror. They lived through the WWII blitz. Through IRA bombings in the 1990s. Through coordinated attacks on subways and buses in 2005. And during the Brexit campaign, the murder of MP Jo Cox.
But it took three attacks in three months – on parliament at Westminster in March, at the Manchester concert in May, and now on London Bridge in June – to provoke Prime Minister Teresa May into declaring that there was “far too much tolerance of extremism” in the United Kingdom.
The mass media immediately construed her words as a slap at Islamic extremism. The Independenttrumpeted that all recent attacks were “bound together by the single evil ideology of Islamic extremism.”
Elsewhere in her comments, Teresa May did identify radical Islamists. But her reference to “too much tolerance” was more general.
Categories: Sharp Edges
Tags: Teresa May, extremism, bombings, Manchester, tolerance
7
Road re-construction seems to me to bear distinct parallels to the way churches, political parties, and community organizations operate.
Most social reconstruction follows the “pave it over” model. The old road – the old beliefs, the old ways of doing things, the tried-and-true constitutions and policies of the past – continue to exist under the fresh new face. Or policy.
In churches, the kind of organizations I know best, this means that a 2000-year-old pre-scientific-age text continues to underlie all major decisions. Creeds almost as old remain untouchable.
Similarly, political parties elect new leaders, lay out new platforms. But old prejudices and ideologies still lurk just below the surface.
Occasionally, though, some groups try to start from zero, like building a new highway. But they first have to clear away any broken components of the former road. They have to dig deep to establish root principles. They have to expand that foundation with layers of interpretation.
Categories: Soft Edges
Tags: roads, organizations
5
What would I have done? The question haunts me.
Last week, three men were stabbed after they intervened on a commuter train in Portland, Oregon, to stop a white supremacist from harassing two young women, one of them wearing a head covering.
It seems the women were not doing anything objectionable, other than riding a public train. But the stabber started yelling racial insults and profanities at them. The three men tried to stop him.
Now two of them are dead, and one still recovering in hospital.
And so I wonder, what would I do? I like to think I would do the noble thing, the honorable thing. I like to think I would have stood up for common decency.
If so, would I be dead now?
Tags: Portland, stabbing, Michael Dowd, Lizard Brain, Higher Porpoise