Paris in a minute

Every Monday I play football with a group of learning disabled adults as part of my job. This week as we approached the training ground I was asked by a couple of the service users if we could observe the minute’s silence in memory of those who died in the Paris attacks. This knocked me sideways as I hadn’t expected them to engage so fully with the subject matter or the fact that part-way through our game there would be people standing silent in memory of those who died. As the time approached I gathered the group and said that we would be marking the event and they were free to stand quietly or step away if they wanted to. Nobody stepped away so we all stood around the centre spot and hung our heads, like so many sports teams had over the weekend, and observed our silence with those in France and around the world.

After the game we all sat down for lunch but the events were clearly playing on the minds of service users. I simply wasn’t prepared. The most common question I faced was “Why? Why did this have to happen to innocent people?”. I was floundering. Thinking on my feet I found myself saying that the people who carried out the attacks were selfish, angry and evil. These were concepts that the group I work with had some grasp of. For all that I thought of my ham-fisted explanation it seemed to find resonance with those who were engaged.

Why am I sharing this? Because it makes me want to shout into the abyss... at all the people making this more complicated than it is. None of the service users referenced religion, ethnicity, nationality or ideology; because that doesn’t matter. This is a tragedy because of the human loss. Regardless of who they were, what they believed or how they spent their lives, people died because these men were selfish, angry and evil. To call it anything else gives the perpetrators greater credit than they deserve and to hang something political from this tragedy is to detract from the senseless loss.