What's the matter with me? Don't I care?

Can't I decide who to care for?

Belgium’s had quite a bit to process these last two days. As I write this (and, in order not to tax you, I’m delaying its mailing to 12.30, when I’ll be nonchalantly handing my car to my mechanic for the bi-annual MoT test, and you’ll be, hopefully nonchalantly, reading this), it’s been 24 hours since a Tunisian gunman killed two Swedes and seriously injured a taxi driver in the Belgian capital. We have followed on the foot the deliberations of our Minister for Home Affairs, Ms Verlinden, and our Prime Minister, Mr de Croo, for we look to those in positions of responsibility and leadership to guide us in these times of distress. Today, Brussels schools closed, out of concern for their pupils and their pupils’ families. Much has happened to which the general public is not privy, but gallant and hard-working defenders of public safety have worked hard to track down and, as Ms Verlinden herself put it, “neutralise” the culprit. He is dead, his weapon secured and yet all is not well, for now the questions arise: How? Why? Who else? What next?

They’re questions that we ask about the unseating of Mr Kevin McCarthy in the United States. About the injustice being wreaked upon Robert Roberson III in Texas. The fighting in Donbas in the Ukraine. The injustices within Russia, within Azerbaijan, within Armenia, within Australia, within New Zealand, within the United Kingdom, at the EU’s external border, in Niger, in Haiti, in the Dominican Republic, in Kenya, in Uganda, in Palestine, in Israel, incessantly.

Press coverage; misinformation; fake photos; expletives; blood. Above all, blood. Rivers of blood, bloody rivers, rivulets of blood down faces and across newspaper front pages: the blood in the streets, the blood in our veins and the blood from which we’re descended.

In the rock musical Jesus Christ Superstar, Yvonne Elliman sang I Don’t Know How To Love Him, and that was a strange thing for an actress playing Mary Magdalene to sing. How can anyone not know how to love Jesus? Whatever Rice and Lloyd-Webber’s take was on the relationship between Mary Magdalene and Jesus Christ, it’s a line that’s rattled around my head these last days: we don’t know how to love one another? No prescribed standard, no pass mark, no litmus test, no pre-set qualification: just love, as you would be loved. No more. No less.

What’s it all about?

Will Palestine not be loved? Will Israel not be loved? Will either love me, can they love each other, and, in the end, the most troubling, can I love them, both?

Here are two performances on the violin. Ray Chen playing the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64.

And the lament played by a little boy outside the prison into which Fitzcarraldo was thrown for losing his rag in Iquitos.

I love both of them. I really, really love both of them.

I really love both of them.

Can you kill anyone to fix this? Who? Where are they? Do you bring your other children with you to do it? Or do you get a babysitter for your other kids so you can go and try to kill them? Is your babysitter alive? If you can’t kill your child’s murderer specifically, is there someone else you could kill? Would it feel good then and there, like working out or taking a shit? If so, how long would it take for the feeling to dissipate?

This shocked me. It is good to be shocked.

Dans ce pays-ci, il faut choquer les gens de temps en temps, pour encourager les autres.