Enemy within

I returned to work yesterday, with a security user group meeting, to which members of the HANR Outreach Team were invited. The HANR crew are social workers dedicated to the city centre's street people. Last month, I discovered to my surprise that security personnel weren't acquainted with them or their work, so I secured an invitation for them to join the meeting. As there are a handful of street people who can cause real problems for the public and security people when they are the worse for wear with drink or drugs (not to mention the persistent sometimes awkward beggars), I felt this was long overdue. 

Street level social workers can defuse difficult situations sometimes simply because they know people causing a rumpus by name. They know how to draw them away from making worse trouble. So it was positive start in the general direction of managing problems, particularly in the evenings when street people hang around waiting for the soup run to start around the Charles Street exit from the shopping centre. I hope there can be a regular representation at the meeting from the HANR team in future.

This morning I wrote up the minutes of the meeting from my notes, then headed into the office to print them off for editorial corrections. It took me an age to do this because the internet connection went down, as it often does around Friday teatime. I'd done the minutes on Google Docs, being too lazy to save them to a memory stick to carry. Serves me right to rely on this Cloud nonsense. We simply don't yet have as a rule universal stable consistent 24/7 internet access. Even if it's 99% good, it goes down in the 1% when you need it, if now slowing to a crawl when something big happens. As was the case today perhaps.

After I got the minutes printed from Google Docs - less of a pain than it used to be - I took time out to check my Twitter feed, and saw the first reports just coming in of the Oslo bombing, then the shootings at Utoeya Island. Obama was quick to condemn international terrorism, I noted. A a group of fanatical idiots claimed the attacks for their perverted cause, but by the time I got home a different reality was emerging from the facts on the ground. An enemy within - an upper class racist far right extremist - pure Aryan Norwegian - author of both outrages. A different category of idolater of violence. Every country has them they seem to emerge in public from nowhere - and what suffering they cause. The human race sometimes seems unable to get the measure of its own capacity for violence, and it can break out even in the most secure and peaceful of places, like Oslo.

Few seem willing to hear the critique of theologians and spiritual guides of the effects of a culture of violence which is tolerated almost universally, so much so that it is part of our mindset, part of the way we take leisure in movies and the world of sport. The world is so attached to its demons and idols that its only when violent acts cause large numbers of deaths that there's much collective consideration as to why this is so. I seem to have been nagging on about it in sermons for the past forty years to no avail. 

Now I give admin support to an outfit that enables security people in the city to communicate and work with each other in keeping shops pubs and clubs safe to visit and use. I get to see how difficult their job is, and what a lot of problem people there are behaving violently in public. That goodness it's rarely with guns here in Cardiff, but that there is violence at all, whether on the pitch or in the streets cause me to wonder what kind of world we think we have made.