This post is a combined response to ‘Day 7: Let social media inspire you’, last Tuesday’s prompt on the WordPress Writing 101 course (which asked us to respond to one from a selection of embedded tweets), and to the Daily Post Weekly photo challenge which this week asked us to share a photo that would make us forget the sad times, ‘this week, it’s all about revelling in a win’.

The prompt ‘Victory’.

I was about to do that.

And then, on Friday 13th things changed.

Again.

Shit, as they say, happens.

So, in responding to both prompts, this post goes a little ‘off piste’, as I used one of my own tweets and, decided to reflect on the concept of Victory in the light of recent events and my own experience.

On the morning of 7 July, 2005, I  walked out from the door of my apartment and walked about 200m towards the London Undergound station at Edgware Road. For some reason I had a sudden change of mind, I decided to take the bus. Instead of walking straight on and down into the station to take the tube I normally took, I turned left and jumped aboard a bus. Moments later, well, moments later is now history. My decision to turn left meant I am not (yet) history.

 

Both of these photos were taken from the balcony of our apartment in London.

For days afterwards, weeks, months, sleep was impossible, the streets were closed, within a few hundred metres lay St Mary’s Hospital, London and Paddington Green Police Station.

That day in London, the day after all of us who lived and worked in London had celebrated the ‘victory’ of being selected as the hosts of the 2012 Olympic Games, turned into a day from hell. A day in which four suicide bombers killed 52 people and injured 700 more. A few days later, an innocent man was gunned down at an underground station because he was thought to be a terrorist.

Who is the victor here? The suicide bombers, who despite the intense security after 9/11 managed to evade the security put in place by a (once) powerful nation? The people of London (and I was one of them) who the next day defiantly boarded tube trains to show we would not be intimidated? The military personnel who guide drones to kill from the skies?

None of us.

There are no victors in this war.

The world will not be at peace until we find a way to resolve our differences.

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WordPress Writing 101 (November 2015): Day 7