Scary mind games on the tube

[fluffymark]

I hate to say it, but London has changed over the last few days. All that British stuff upper lip about standing up to terrorists by drinking tea in their direction has turned out to be a short term consolement. London is now a city afraid. A city scared of the unknown. It's happened slowly, but for the past week or every tube train I've travelling on I've unwittingly been dragged into the mind game of fear. I'm sittin on tha train, and find myself *aware* of everyone around me. I look at them, and their bags. Is the bag large? Does it look strange? Is that person opposite me muslim? What's under that large padded coat? And I'm not the only one - everyone is checking out everyone else in the same way. The trains are full of nervous, scared glances everywhere. Someone gets on with a large rucksack - everyone in the carriage looks at them hard. People move away. People are afraid. It's a horrible horrible mind game. Worst affected are the asians. I see people about to sit down on empty seats, and then see that theres an asian muslim man with a large beard in the next seat, suddenly look uncomfortable, and decide they'd sit elsewhere. The asian man himself looks even more uncomfortable, all closed in and paranoid. Everyone is afraid of him. He's not a terrorist. Nor is the guy standing near me with the large jacket. But people are still afraid. Everyone's playing the scary mind game of fear. It's totally irrational. But nobody wants to lose this game by not paying attention. And becasue of this, everyone is losing. Trust is rapidly fading. The terrorists have changed us. What could possibly be more frightening than having an enemy who can't give a reason you can understand for wanting to destroy you?

Comments

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Having an enemy that changes the reason every time you change something (or pretend to have changed it) to take their last excuse away.

[bad-faery.livejournal.com]

I'm really worried about division. The police having to shoot people, people turning against the police, people turning against each other... and that's exactly what the terrorists want.

[nipple-salad.livejournal.com]

that's exactly what I'm thinking as well. The real TERROR is not the attack itself - it's the fear that eats people as a result, everyone turning against each other. The terrorism is at work right now. :(

It is so sad. And so effective.

[dreamfracture.livejournal.com]

Yes, but people are still using the tube in spite of this. Of COURSE people are afraid - that's the only sensible state of mind. But we're not letting it screw up our lives.

[robert-jones.livejournal.com]

I on the other hand, am conscious of no difference whatsoever.

[arkady.livejournal.com]

Likewise. However it's all too easy for one person to allow their own fears to cloud their perceptions of other people's behaviour and ascribe their own fear erroneously to others.

Meep

[casby.livejournal.com]

My brother takes the tube every morning to Canary Wharf and has reported a marked downturn in the number of people who are brave enough to still even use the underground at all.

To be honest I'm more worried about being shot 7(!!!) times in the head for wearing my coat and carrying my backpack when I visit my parents in London later this week, than being blown up by a bomb.

Re: Meep

[pinkdormouse.livejournal.com]

And looking at it from the opposite angle, my colleague in London, who has to use the M25 to get home every day (and always has) reports that it takes her way longer these days.

Meanwhile I'm bouncing around randomly smiling at Suffolk folks of all ethnicities, much to the bemusement of some of them.

Gina

Re: Meep

[mirabehn.livejournal.com]

Meanwhile I'm bouncing around randomly smiling at Suffolk folks of all ethnicities, much to the bemusement of some of them.

Hehe! I'm doing that to various Colnbrook/Slough/Windsor peeps.

Some of them seem to like it lots. I've had any number of people smile back, including one of the more gorgeous Muslim women who work at Slough library (hurray!), and a random well'ard-looking shaven-headed bloke in Colnbrook, who looked like he was making a vast effort not to grin broadly, and instead managed an odd kind of mouth-twitch...

[doseybat.livejournal.com]

I have not been around to observe the last week and a half, but between 8 July - 16 July I suddenly started getting seats on the tube at rushour. I dont want to be pessimistic, but this is not an accident.

But humans are fantastically adaptable - the more events happen, the less we will notice them. Plenty of people live in Jerusalem and go to work every day, I guess it just begins to seem like part of the scenery after a bit.

[arkady.livejournal.com]

Which is precisely how things were during the height of the IRA bombing campaign.

It appears to me that the ones who feel most afraid right now are the ones who are either too young to remember what it was like to live and work in London during the height of the IRA mainland campaign or simply weren't here in this country at the time. But I grew up with things like this; hell, I was an officer in the RAF cadets in St.Albans when an IRA cell tried to blow up the Blues & Royals concert (they blew themselves up by mistake), I survived the Kings Cross fire, and I worked on an Underground station during 9/11 and its aftermath.

I won't go so far as to say the current atmosphere and situation is normal for me, but it's certainly no reason to live my life in fear. Or to assume everyone around me shares that fear. paranoia makes it all too easy to ascribe relevence to pure coincidence.

[mrph.livejournal.com]

It appears to me that the ones who feel most afraid right now are the ones who are either too young to remember what it was like to live and work in London during the height of the IRA mainland campaign or simply weren't here in this country at the time

*nod* I've been thinking that myself.

And

[angryangeltoo.livejournal.com]

This is how we lose. By giving into fear and division. Hons the next time you see people moving away from a muslim person or a muslim person standing up without a seat and theres one next to you I would like it if you sat next to them or asked them to sit down next to you. I am very proud of my workplace as on Friday we finally starting kicking people out who were verbally abusive towards my Islamic colleauges. We must show solidarity.

Re: And

[elettaria.livejournal.com]

Excellent idea about the second, solidarity is vital and my first thought on hearing about the bombings was, "oh hell, there'll be attacks on Muslims again," but I disagree about the first.

In the summer of 1993 I was fifteen and spending a month in Israel. I went to a music summer school right up north in Galilee, near Kiryat Shmona, very close to the border of Lebanon, where I had great fun doing lots of music and even more flirting. Ten days or so in, Lebanon started firing katyusha rockets at Israel, at which point I got to know the inside of an Israeli bomb shelter. (To anyone whoh remembers this, the UK news totally buggered up reporting as ever: yes, Lebanon fired first.)

So we sat in the bomb shelter for a few hours that morning, during which my mad Chilean-Israeli composition teacher yelled at us for not having finished our compositions ("Well, Shidlovski, we've been sitting in a bomb shelter all morning and I didn't have a chance to get to my room..." "So?") and called everyone monster as per usual, then the afternoon was classes and such as usual. That evening, the camp leaders said it was up to us whether we wanted to sleep in the shelters or not, and we all drifted into our little groups to argue about this. One guy of fourteen, who was always the star of the midnight political discussions about socialism, argued very persuasively that we shouldn't give in to fear and intimidation. So a number of us, probably the majority, slept in our rooms. Somewhere around six in the morning we were woken up by explosions and dived into those shelters within a minute, where we sat around shivering for a few hours before being evacuated (I sat more or less under a harp in the car all the way back to Jerusalem). Saying "I refuse not to use public transport because I won't be intimidated" when it's high-risk (which I wouldn't consider London, but in Israel this situation arises all the time) doesn't do anything against terrorism, but it can get you killed. And most people I know in Israel have narrowly avoided death by bomb attack, and some have lost friends or family in the attacks.