So another shooting in another city. Three dead in Montreal and the usual platitudes pour forth from Westminster. 'Britain stands with our Canadian allies,' they say.
How quaint. How utterly predictable. One cannot help but draw comparisons to the late Roman Empire where bread and circuses masked a rot from within.
Our civilisations now face a similar entropy, where violence erupts not from foreign invaders but from our own misguided societies. The Victorians, for all their faults, understood order. They understood consequence.
Today, we have softened, and the result is this: a bullet-riddled street in a polite Canadian city. We speak of 'allyship' as if it were a shield against a bullet. It is not.
We should instead ask: What have we become? What have we permitted? The fall of Rome was gradual, then sudden.
This is our gradual. The sudden is yet to come.
