When trouble comes to your own back yard

A region that bleats on about the mistreatment of black people and the preferential treatment of whites and how an atrocity is reported either seriously or dismissively, depending on the colour of the victims’ skin, patently doesn’t give a damn when a terrorist attack far away, in London, results in maiming and loss of life. Because the victims weren’t black.

It was reported in the media, of course, but largely in a “let’s hope it doesn’t happen here” way.

It is a sign of how the world has become emotionally bankrupt when each of us will only be driven to impassioned comment if hostility and tragedy are directed against our own people.

And yes, of course that is what inspired these 800 words from a commentator who would normally be looking for something to get humorous about.

You know how Donald Trump uses social media, especially Twitter, to get his message across because it cuts out any input, alteration or dilution, by the traditional media? It’s exactly what the private individual does in the 21st century, to broadcast a point of view, not due to contempt for the news organisations but because he or she has no other platform.

Thus we grit our teeth as a Facebook “friend” gets all self-righteous about something, speaking up as a little-known voice of reason for a sector of society that doesn’t have a focal point, or at least not one with the clout to make itself heard on a national scale.

I was thinking about that just the other day when a Trinidadian friend – a highly intelligent woman who could be a significant voice in the country’s media but who instead ploughs her own furrow – made some glib, populist comment about how, in the case of a missing person, no one gets worked up about it unless it’s a “pretty white girl”.

Coincidentally, a quick glance at the TT media the same day produced two stories about precisely that: missing black girls who had been found.

The attack at Westminster might seem inconsequential when you’re doing the school run in Arima or putting the finishing touches to your political agenda in Scarborough, but it’s real to some people.

And there was a wide range of nationalities involved in the Westminster attack, because it was right in the middle of the city, where tourists go to have a look at the famous Houses of Parliament.

Medical staff ran to the scene from the nearby St Thomas’s hospital. My son works there.

He’s a nurse.

It was his day off, as it happens, but he could quite easily have been walking across the bridge when the first element happened: the strangely modern barbarism of ploughing a car into a group of people.

So okay, it might take an event in some way “close to home” to wake us up, but wake up we must.

Why shouldn’t a terrorist attack happen in TT ? Sure, it’s a relatively low-profile place in comparison with London and Paris, but then why attack Bali? What’s that little country got to do with anything? And why mow down a lot of holidaymakers on a beach in Tunisia? Who cares about Tunisia? Well, Tunisians do, for a start.

And most of the people killed and wounded were foreigners anyway. Perhaps what makes Islamic State so dangerous is that it isn’t a country itself, so everyone who doesn’t belong to it is a foreigner.

Its aim is to make the world unsafe for everyone. And because the civilized world is so politically correct, the do-gooders who refuse to call a spade a spade maintain that fighting back is wrong.

That is until IS pops up in their neck of the woods and destroys lives at random there.

Fighting back against Islamic extremism isn’t fighting in the name of another religion.

It’s not a religious war in that sense. The point is that global aggressors must be stopped, regardless of why they are doing it. And if one argument is that peaceful Muslims must sort the problem out themselves, then fine, but they had better get on with it before it’s too late.

There is a comparison to be drawn with the school playground, where children will keep quiet as the bully picks on others, for fear of becoming the target themselves if they speak up.

Like it or not, the USA and the UK will always support an innocent underdog, and if the role of international policeman attracts derision, again, just wait until there’s a blinkered zealot driving a truck into people down your street and then see if you can stay balanced and non-judgemental.