Manchester – a post-event story that we all need to read

Reuters photo

By

Hazel Speed

Manchester, as a city, the UK and civilised free thinking people worldwide, all grieve the tragic loss of life through the Manchester bombing. Likewise bombings anywhere in the world, they solve nothing but bring deep sorrow and breed terrorists of the future, in some extreme circumstances.

I just want to pass on a story I heard today, as to be honest, it says everything, but you the reader must come up with the answer to it, as there is none that I can see. Sad though that is.

Thank you, therefore, if you can read the detail for yourself and pass it on. The more people who know about it, then better the chance of something positive coming out of the situation, so that we can all collectively come up with a way to stop this circular problem.

A surgeon had spent 48 hours operating on the victims of the Manchester bombings. He had been working a long, hard, and traumatic shift, putting his honed skills to great use to save life, and surgically help restore shattered limbs and broken bodies.

On his way home however he suffered abuse and was told ‘why did he not go back to where he came from’. (The likely polite version of words actually used).

The surgeon was not a white man, but the irony being, he was born about 30 miles away so actually was born in the UK.

Ironically enough, the former TV series Roots is being repeated on British TV, and the injustice of those days still reduces me to tears within some scenes, and I am white English, and yes, I was born here. At a visit to the Maritime Museum I unexpectedly saw a set of slave chains that were in olden sailing ships, and my eyes welled up with tears, then I heard myself saying ‘Not in my name.’

We are all brothers and sisters, and wrong is wrong, injustice has no skin, so does not have any colour, it affects us all regardless of where we are born, and where we live.

Many of us who have suffered other kinds of injustice throughout life can empathise with how this surgeon must have felt, but even then we can only do so up to a point if such things had never been said to us; one has to hear such words being hurled in this personal way to know how much it hurts.

If the people who shouted abuse at this surgeon required his surgical skills on one of their relatives, in such circumstances after a bombing attack, would they care about his skin colour then?”

Hazel Speed

Photo (c) Hazel Speed – used by kind permision to Tuck Magazine

Hazel Speed is a Philosopher, Writer, and Artist with various creative projects at differing stages of development. Her flaship project is an animation which has produced a film short: www.thepinkprofessor.com. She has also written an E-novel, ‘Just Suppose…!‘ which is available via the attached link.

Art sites: www.candystoreart.com, www.terrificart.com, www.artbadges.co.uk.