What have I done?
As a new mum, I feel like I have to ask myself the question
above. I have brought an innocent child into a world, in which evil runs free
and hides in plain sight.
I sat and cried this morning; I read the news and felt
myself break inside. Those poor children, the families in attendance have been
victim to a cowardly attack by someone who has nothing but hate in his heart!
I sat and spoke with my partner this morning as we tried to
digest the reports flooding in about the poor souls lost to a terror attack at
Manchester Arena. My BF actually said, I am scared to take her anywhere or do
anything with her. My response to his fears, was, “That is what these
terrorists want”, and I truly believe that. They want fear, disorder and chaos…
they thrive on it. Terror is how these extremist’s get a stronghold, they use
it to their benefit. Retaliations against one side, then fuel the beliefs of
the other, the way things are going right now it will never end! It is a
vicious cycle. It’s just unfortunate that nowadays with technology, this enemy
is finding it way too easy to hide in plain sight and use social media to its
advantage.
How do you cope with the crippling fear that something will
happen to your child? I mean I am 100%
worse than most as with part of my diagnosis of Anxiety is that I
Catastrophise. I always think of the worst case scenario, which is why I avoid
large crowds of people etc. But at the same time – I don’t want to pass these
irrational (I know that they are irrational at least) fears onto my daughter. I
want her to grow up confident and sure of herself, independent and also caring;
but will this just lead to problems…? Here I go again with the worrying…
Due to last nights atrocity we likely have a whole
generation of children that are going to be afraid of going to concerts. Just
this morning I heard a radio presenter stating that his daughter asked him if
anything would happen at the Olly Murs concert she was going to… it’s heart-breaking
that this coward attacked in the first place, but that he actually targeted an
event with a large audience of children… its despicable, and there is no
rationalising that.
My theory is that if we allow ourselves to become shut ins
and we allow the fear to stop us doing what we do, then the terrorists are
winning. So all we can do is Keep Calm and Carry On. They want to cause divide
in communities – so stand together. We need to at this point. It is also worth
pointing out that Muslim’s are not responsible for this attack; the extremists
are. It is highly likely that some of the emergency services and first
responders/ doctors/nurses etc that helped the wounded last night were muslim… So
targeting innocent people for their religion will not resolve anything, it will
only divide us more.
I just hope that our children and our children’s children
find a way to make this world a better place, to work together to look after
their neighbour and to try and come up with solutions to all of these problems.
