The Fatherland is drowning in a silence that tastes of ash and bitter coffee. Six souls, mothers and their little ones, gunned down at a mother-and-child centre in what police are calling a ‘targeted attack’ on the very fabric of human tenderness. As the world recoils, our own security talking heads are already polishing their crystal balls, warning that the contagion of extremism is crawling through the Channel Tunnel.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, dear reader, or god forbid sentimental. The dead have barely cooled, and already the pundits are spinning prophecies, as if violence were a game of dominoes and Germany’s collapse was just another tile falling towards Dover. Oh, the exquisite agony of living in an age where every massacre is a data point, every tear a plot twist in the great narrative of civilisation’s decline.
The attackers, a lone wolf or a pack of ideologues, are yet unnamed. Their reasoning is a blank space we shall fill with our own fears. Was it a far-right ghoul?
A jihadi wraith? Or simply a man with a gun and a fractured mind? The answer is all of them, none of them, and the hollow echo of a society that has traded humanity for security theatre.
Our own ‘experts’ on the sofa, frowning over their third glasses of claret, will tell you that the ‘threat level remains elevated’, that we must be ‘vigilant’, that we must ‘never let this become normalised’. But normalised it is. The blood has been syndicated, the mourning broadcast, the fear monetised.
We shall see the same faces on the news, the same platitudes, the same grave nods. And in a week, another tragedy, another metaphor. So let us sit in our comfortable living rooms, safe behind our double glazing, and marvel at the grotesque ballet of it all.
The mothers who will never tuck their children in again, the fathers who will haunt the corridors of police stations asking why. Why indeed. Because the world has become a fever dream, and we are all running a temperature.
Because somewhere, a man decided that a mother-and-child centre was a legitimate target. Because the extremism we fear is not a foreign import but a native weed, watered by neglect and fertilised by indifference. God save us from our own reflections.
