Time for it to stop

I do not ask the wounded person how he feels,
I myself become the wounded person.

Two years ago, the world looked on in horror as the news from the Middle East unfolded. The wait that my friend endured to find out if her Israeli soldier nephew, who just wanted to go to a music festival with his friends, was alive, was agonising. The good news for him and her is that he was. But people he knew weren’t.

Two years and one day later, the world is still looking on in horror at what is happening in Gaza. Children should not be starved to death as a consequence of the actions of the generation above them. People should not be bombed out of existence as consequence of the actions of their own government.

But they are. And it was always thus. Look across the world at conflicts everywhere. Look back in history at conflicts through time. Humans have a seemingly never-ending capacity for cruelty and barbarism towards other humans. War is hell.

I’ve made no secret of the fact that I am no fan of the current US President, this isn’t a column that hides its feelings in the interests of journalistic non-bias. Sorry. However, if he can get the war in Gaza to stop, then he will have achieved more than Joe Biden did. And, though it pains me to say it, I believe this is possibly one instance when Trump may be able to achieve more than Kamla Harris would have done.

What worries me. No, what scares me, is the way that the narrative has changed. The vitriol with which any dissent from opposing points of view is greeted. A woman was filmed yesterday cutting off the yellow ribbons that had been placed near a synagogue, to highlight the fate of the hostages taken on October 7 2023, and the killing of over 1,000 people. The ribbons are not ‘condoning genocide’ as the art student responsible claimed. Removing them, however, is akin to condoning Hamas’s actions  two years ago. The increasing lack of empathy, the inability to understand that both sides can do appalling things to others, is one of the things that scares me about the way the modern world is moving. So much of it is fuelled by social media, and, with the rise of increasingly sophisticated AI, it’s hard to know what is and isn’t true. That’s a subject for a whole other rant.

Is this out of place in a website that’s dedicated to the UK building materials industry? Possibly. But also, not. Because what happens in the wider world affects us, all of us. It affects the global economy, which affects all our businesses. Just look what happened when Putin invaded Ukraine, and the effect on the UK economy of that.

That, it has to be said, is another thing that worries me. How is it that we have become so used to the Ukraine war that we have stopped talking about it? Bombing cities, stealing Ukrainian children and bringing them up in Russia, as Russians, trying to subjugate Ukraine by removing an entire generation…I’d call that a form of genocide.

I really want whatever Trump is doing to work, for the bombing and the starving to stop, for the hostages, that are left to be released and returned to their families. However, the cynic in me – maybe the realist –  fears that this is just part of a cycle.  We’ve been here before, and until humans learn the lessons from the past – which we won’t – we’ll be here again.