R.I.P Jo Cox

[smokingboot]

There are days when grief must be wordless. This is not one of those days. We are dealing with politics, we are dealing with people, and that means words.

We are dealing with death, death because of words. The suspect, named Thomas Meir, is thought to have links with the Springbok  Club, a hard right wing group. An eye-witness has reported him shouting  'Britain First,' as he killed Jo Cox. He also had issues with mental illness.

If he had shouted  'Allah Akbar,' we'd be calling him a terrorist.

The sorrow and rage I feel makes me incapable of continuing this post, but I have found an excellent piece in the Spectator from which I quote: http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/06/a-day-of-infamy/

"When you encourage rage you cannot then feign surprise when people become enraged. You cannot turn around and say, ‘Mate, you weren’t supposed to take it so seriously. It’s just a game, just a ploy, a strategy for winning votes.’

When you shout BREAKING POINT over and over again, you don’t get to be surprised when someone breaks. When you present politics as a matter of life and death, as a question of national survival, don’t be surprised if someone takes you at your word. You didn’t make them do it, no, but you didn’t do much to stop it either.

Sometimes rhetoric has consequences. If you spend days, weeks, months, years telling people they are under threat, that their country has been stolen from them, that they have been betrayed and sold down the river, that their birthright has been pilfered, that their problem is they’re too slow to realise any of this is happening, that their problem is they’re not sufficiently mad as hell, then at some point, in some place, something or someone is going to snap. And then something terrible is going to happen."