{void}

Death is always pointless, isn't it. No one gains, except if the person dying was in pain before and then, perhaps. 

I hate that I feel that it would somehow have been better, that I could somehow understand, that I could reconcile, if it had been caused by the usual suspects, if there had been some kind of terrorist group behind it. I could understand the co-ordination, the planning, the brutal efficiency in dispatching as many people as possible.

Instead I'm left back at a question I have been asking for most of my life, which is if someone has mental health problems so severe that their personality is changed beyond all recognition, that religion or whatever other conduit is focused on and as a result of the mental illness becomes warped and broken, who are you forgiving for their actions? The person they were or the person they are? Who do you mourn the loss of\? Who do you grieve for?

Is it wrong to even mention grieving for the man who orchestrated all this? Is it okay to feel sympathy for his family and a deep sense of loss in humanity that we didn't spot someone so broken yet again, that yet again, yet another country can be added to the list of ones who fail the mentally ill.

We are there. The US is there. And now Norway. There may be others, I can't think. This is not reporting and these are not facts, these are questions I might be alone in asking, but I don't think so. I think there will be others who can't read the details because it breaks their hearts.

Death on this scale is normal in war. War is brutal and expected. Those caught within it are often times trained to cope to be within it. They feel fear, of course they do, but they are prepared for it, it is acknowledged, it is defended against as much as the mind can be taught to defend against such things.

So when I read the BBC front page headline 'MP tells of escape from island', I can't read it. It's the stuff of my nightmares and I don't want to. I don't want to know and I'm sorry if that makes me somehow less of a person in your eyes, I'm sorry if this is some kind of perjury that we are expected to make in exchange for not being in his position but I can't.

I have finally found the thing I cannot be dispassionate about because it is written down. These were the things I didn't write after London, because I had no where to put them but I would have. I felt the same feelings of confusion and anger and despair. Now another country will go through the same process. 

I am sorry, so very very sorry. We are failing and we must do better.