Eyre Lines

20 dead in Manchester suicide bombing, I read. It feels too close to home; I drove round Manchester on Saturday, I’ve been to the location, and there are people I know who knew people who were there (although not any of the casualties, it seems).

That is, I suppose, two or three degrees of separation for me. It’s said that in six degrees of separation, I’m connected with the whole world. On 3rd May, three died and 28 were injured in a suicide bombing in Kabul, so I’m presumably connected with the victims (and the perpetrator) by six degrees or less – and yet, I didn’t really register that news, assuming that I ever read it.

I am not supposed to take into account degrees of separation in working out if someone is my neighbour, and therefore deserves my love and care – the parable of the Good Samaritan establishes that with force, as Samaritans in the first century were the hereditary enemies of the Jews and would be assumed to be more likely to be the bandits who beat the traveller and dumped his body beside the road than to help him in any way, far less the abundant way portrayed. So, in thinking of Manchester, I have to think also of Kabul and of countless locations across the Middle East – and not restricted to the Middle East – where similar or worse atrocities have been happening. I need to weep for all the victims of violence towards random innocents worldwide – and that includes the random innocents regularly killed or maimed by my own country in Syria at the moment.

I cannot practice selective compassion, in other words. But it’s difficult, because two degrees of separation is a lot closer than six, and by US or particularly Canadian standards Manchester is practically next door – I could be on the outskirts of Manchester within about an hour, given reasonably clear roads, and my Canadian aunt used to think it reasonable to drive much further than that to visit a decent restaurant. It’s difficult because the victims in other countries are not as much like me as are the victims in Manchester. OK, granted the Manchester victims are mostly teen or subteen girls with a liking for Ariana Grande, which makes them nearly as foreign to me as does another language and another religion, and they are presumably mostly from Lancashire (and I’m from Yorkshire, and traditionally Yorkshiremen may have needed to hear the parable of the Good Lancastrian, as the events of the 15th century still have traction), but even so… my daughter might just about have been one of them fifteen or more years ago, and none of my family have ever been to Kabul as far as I’m aware. That, however, is to try hard to find difference, and to equate differences which I can’t feel are anything like equivalent. Afghans, Iraquis or Syrians are “more foreign” by quite a long way.

But they are my neighbours, and I weep for them as I weep for the dead and injured of Manchester.