Thursday 23 May 2013

A First Lesson

This week has had some pretty horrific stories in the news. A devastating tornado in the States, the coverage of the trial of Mark Bridger who is now denying abducting and murdering five-year-old April Jones, and yesterday the horrifying attack in Woolwich that left a young man dead in the street to name just three.

My coping mechanisms aren’t functioning at their best at the moment. Pregnancy hormones are making me feel even more strongly about stories like this, and I have shed a lot of tears as a result of watching the news. Last night, I found myself wondering what kind of world we were going to bring our baby into. I wondered this for about a minute and a half, and then I remembered how wonderful the world can be. After the bombing at the Boston marathon I saw something on facebook I think that said ‘when tragedy happens, look for the people who do the extraordinary’. It pointed out the people who ran towards the blasts to help, the runners who went straight to the hospital to give blood, and the incredible response of the Bostonians offering people hospitality.

Horrible things will always happen. We cannot shelter ourselves from this fact, but the reason that they are newsworthy and leave us feeling so shocked is because we live in a country where things like this don’t happen every day. There are millions of people that don’t have that luxury. It is right to feel disgusted by the murder in Woolwich yesterday, and it is right to be angry at the men who did this. However, it is not right to blame their race or their religion. The ‘get them all out of the country’ band wagon has been jumped on by people I thought would know better. The people who plan and conduct terror attacks are to be blamed, but this has very little, if in fact anything, to do with religion. They may use it as an excuse, but if they didn’t have religion they would use something else as their excuse.

I like living in a multi-cultural society. Not being religious myself, I like to learn about other people’s beliefs and I like to talk to people about different cultures. I actually know very little about the rest of the world, but I am willing and excited to learn when the opportunity presents itself, and it saddens me to still see so much racism in our own culture.

I follow an account on Twitter called @YesYoureRacist, who call out people who tweet racist statements. Yesterday they retweeted someone from Birmingham who said “Why don't all the english get together and kill the muslims! What's wrong with the country!!". A tweeter replied and said, “what, like Hitler?!”, to which she said “yes, exactly like Hitler!”. This exchange is a terrifying example of ignorance. I guess, seeing as you can’t tell someone’s religion just by looking at them, the English would have to go round asking folk if they were Jewish Muslim. Maybe in 70 years, the new Justin Beiber could write something in the visitor book of a museum.

What I decided last night, however, was to have a little chat to my belly. I told our little unborn baby that I will help to point out the good in the world when bad things happen, and that my ambition is for them to be happy in whatever they do, but that we will raise them to be accepting and respectful of everybody. Our baby will be taught about equality, about recognising the difference between right and wrong and about standing up for people less fortunate than themselves. I have absolutely no idea how we will do all this, and I won’t know until we’ve met our little one and found out about his or her personality, but I suspect we will lead by example.

In response, my baby gave me a little nudge in the belly that I felt from the outside for the first time. I took that as agreement, and then had a little cry because it was so lovely.