It is our war too
It could have happened at any time. It did now. And as life changed in New York and Washington after the 9/11 terrorist blitz, and just as the mood changed in Madrid following the gory train blasts there, so London will change too following Thursday’s rush-hour carnage. The world is changing, divisions are getting sharper, and the war against terrorism, however distant it may feel to many of us, will further deepen the chasm between the two sides. It is not the first time that we need to show a great deal of flexibility in adapting to change. It is not just our sense of prosperity that needs protection. It’s actually something greater than that: immaterial as the values that glue our societies together may seem, this is not something we can leave undefended to knee-jerk and misguided ideology-charged emotionalism which usually results in simplified good-vs-evil dichotomies. It is time we saw things for what they are: Our children will live in a different world. We can no longer afford to pamper our left-wing conscience. It’s time we took a stand on what is happening – not just take refuge in our little corner of this world, hoping that disaster never reaches our doorstep. We have been in the wrong before, so there is no excuse. For their part, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and the rest of world’s strongest politicians should seek political legitimacy in the souls of their voters, in the popular democratic sentiment and not in the closed elites and the small-minded interests that serve politicians in order to serve their own interests. So we can hope that the closing sentence of H.G. Wells’s famous «War of the Worlds» will find its lost meaning: «And strangest of all is it to hold my wife’s hand again, and to think that I have counted her, and that she has counted me, among the dead.»
