FRANCE
George Needham
George Needham
|
Last night, at the Bataclan 118 people were gathered in a packed theatre. United they stood, and united they danced, with one shared passion for a Californian rock band. The passion that such music inspires in a person is primitive and animalistic in its nature, and its influence is widespread; touching certain individuals regardless of their background, their culture, their ethnicity, their religion. One hundred and eighteen unacquainted friends were there in the name of love, and it was in the name of hatred that they never left. The consequences of an act so deprived of mercy, or indeed any remote speck of human nature, strike deep into the heart of what it is to enjoy oneself – terror in its most pure form.
It is therefore understandable that the response inherent to our civilised society is to lock ourselves indoors. ‘Don’t go out, should this happen to you’ becomes banded round our television sets, our radio receivers, and our internet homepages. For the writer, it makes no sense to abandon our duty to ourselves to make the most of the short time we are allocated upon the wonderful planet we find in our possession. My romantic imagination sees the concert halls, the clubs and gig venues up and down the country (nay the civilised world) packed to capacity tonight. It sees sweaty EDM fanatics hand in hand with Paloma Faith-crazed mothers; it sees the streets of Manchester lit up by the overjoyed, fresh from the Warehouse Project, the Soup Kitchen, the Academy. The party will not be silenced. Promoting such a call-to-arms can only be the solution, for those who fell would not have wanted their night to be curtailed, and so in their memory it must continue. Violence will not suppress the grinning faces of the free world. In memory of those who lost their lives on the night of November 13 2015 George Needham is a second-year Physics student at the University of Manchester |