We let evil win if we don’t act
MY daughter was born in Manchester 16 years ago.
She’s not particularly an Ariana Grande fan, but had she been living there, still she may well have gone along.
It’s her cohort that was at the concert en masse on Monday night.
She was born in a hospital amid the biggest council estate in Europe, the inspiration and setting for TV’s Shameless, contemporary poverty at its worst.
We lived in the abutting, much nicer and older part of south Manchester, but the hospital served all equally and brilliantly.
It’s good to get an idea of these places, ordinary places evil can claim for its own, if only to fuel us to know such things can happen here too.
Otherwise we become numbed by distance and lack of connection, the easy step of mass mourning cathartic then forgotten.
Manchester, if you haven’t been there, is a bit like a smaller Melbourne or Sydney or Adelaide even.
Honed from the same era as our capital cities, it grew on the 19th-century industrial revolution, great poverty mixing with great wealth leading later to great social reform and the birthplace of the Suffragette moveHacienda ment. In the early 19th century it had grown so much there was a genuine call for the capital to be moved 320 kilometres north from London.
Tuesday morning in Adelaide, as the atrocity was unfolding, reminded me much of Manchester, thick with mist, although without the cold and wet.
Manchester is innovative too. The FA Cup final, regularly the world’s most watched sporting occasion, was played there in Queen Victoria’s time.
And if you disregard the Beatles, no city matches its modern musical influence – the Bee Gees, Oasis, the Smiths, acid house central and, for the teens, Take That, a mere smattering of examples.
Factory Records, which spawned a global dance culture from the 1980s nightclub amid the old inner-city warehouses, was so named for a reason, a paean to the industry that once enveloped the city, nearby but a world away from Monday’s multipurpose Manchester Arena.
It’s a hard place also. There’ve been bombs before, heavily and nightly for much of the early part of WWII, and more recently in the 1990s when a huge IRA blast brought about a remodelling and revitalisation of the city centre, a stroll from Monday’s explosion.
It has been reborn of late, city-gentrified, the capital of the north of England, factories ceding to designer chic and professional services.
There is an underclass still, innercity slums are rife well within living memory. You can drive a long way and still be weighed down by the urban breakdown.
As a nation of recent immigrants we will have more than a few people here wondering about the events this week, many a wet eye for horrors current and lying ahead.
We can’t flail ourselves every time such a monstrosity opens up.
Genuine as they assuredly were, the “Je suis Paris” solidarity inevitably carried more than a whiff of the selfindulgent, the selfie generation.
But we can’t ignore the human tragedy and ever more rotting of the soul such outrage brings.
It could have been us, in our Australian capitals of similar architecture and association.
Why Ariana Grande? We don’t know. The artist is unlikely to be a factor, the size and simplicity of venue and crowd more likely tangibles.
“I am so so sorry,” she tweeted, a desperate hurt.
Maybe if we adopt a touch more humility around such outrages rather than ascending to the teary and note the perpetrators for the evil they envelop, it might bring better perspective and prompt the need to rationalise clearly, that next time it could be anywhere. This is a local infestation no more. While sackcloth and ashes are not the order of the day, we need to rethink.
Years ago many tragedies brought forth a slew of sick jokes and trench humour. But no more, that safety net has gone. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing, Winston Churchill famously said.
And now, not tomorrow, is the time to take note.