24 May 2017

"Altruism and empathy are what binds us together, and what defines us. We should let no one distract us from this central fact of our nature: neither terrorists nor those who, in response to them, demand that we slam our doors in the faces of an entire community or an entire religion.

Our humanity, in both senses of the word, is on display all over Manchester. You can see it in the queues at the blood donor centres, in the hotels and the private houses that have been thrown open to people stuck in the city after the concert, in the messages posted on social media to help people find missing members of their families, in the donations that thousands of people have made to support victims of the attack, in the taxis giving free rides to hospitals and homes.

But it’s not just Manchester: almost everyone, everywhere, behaves like this. And it is when horrors such as the bombing strike that we remember it. Our task now is not to become the society the terrorists want to create.

So let us celebrate what we are. Let us stand in solidarity with the victims of the attack, while ensuring that justice reaches the perpetrators. And let us not allow either a tiny number of psychopathic murderers, or those who in response to them wish to suppress our humanity, to distract us from the magnificent facts of our nature."

George Monbiot

5 comments:

Colette said...

Refuse to be manipulated into hating.

am said...

"Empathy, the paper explains, appears to exist even in the earliest stages of infancy. Newborn babies become distressed by the cries of other babies. By the time they are 14 months old, children try to alleviate other people’s distress, by comforting or helping them, or by sharing possessions with them."

Thank you so much for posting George Monbiot's heartening article, reminding us what we can know, claim and do in response to hateful actions.

Anonymous said...

Thank you so much for posting this. I needed to be reminded of our better natures.

molly said...

Amen.

A Cuban In London said...

I read the same article in The Guardian and was nodding all the way through. He is such a brilliant writer, isn't he? Capable of bringing out the best of us, humans, in such dire hour of need. Thanks for posting it.

Greetings from London.