Nice… Felicity’s response

Last night before I went to bed I started to see the news come up on my twitter feed about Nice… I hoped it was a bad dream…

This morning when I woke up and once again checked twitter, I saw that my bad dream was a cold harsh reality… At the time of writing, 84 people have been reported as killed with many others injured by a man driving a lorry into a crowd who were out celebrating and being together as families.

In the past month we have seen many things try and divide us as a country.  How people voted, how people have responded to the government, how you feel about certain leaders of certain parties… This above the other things to try and divide us, religion, ethnicity, age, beliefs… This attack seeks to divide the world… and how people respond might look to cause further divisions.  Listening to the news this morning, someone mentioned that this can be seen as a ‘recruitment drive’ and how we respond as nations could have an effect on whether people join ISIS or not…

I was talking to someone yesterday, before this latest attack happened, and they said something that struck with me.  He was talking about capturing the essence of fairness… Respecting others and being polite.  Not saying that to be fair we should put a cap on what people can achieve and what they should do, but that we should be looking at being fair on people.  Being polite, being accommodating, welcoming and having manners.  Loving each other is sometimes difficult, but being fair and ‘treating others as you would like to be treated’ (something drilled into us I’m sure when we were children) is important.

So if you are finding the human race hard to love today, if you are finding your neighbour difficult to get along with because of divisions, because you can’t understand the coldness and hate in the world, just do one thing and be fair.  You don’t have to pretend, just be fair.  And you never know where that might lead you…