Reading Norway, in quiet mourning

Quoting the lines written by Anders Heger (the whole letter can be read under the link
http://www.norskpen.no/English/EnglishDetails/tabid/515/ArticleID/1088/Default.aspx),
one might ask whether sheer fanaticism, megalomania, xenophobia, need to outbreak in such a repulsing form in order to give peace a great chance. This is tragedy, and we are not used to tragedy, even if we perceive it in the satellite news, and not only in Oslo or Utoya:

I really wish you could have seen my city these days. So much is different, we are closer to each other, I am searching for a word to describe the atmosphere, and I can't find anything better than "dignity". Like when the mayor, the king and the prime minister all gave the same message: We are going to meet this the only way we can: With more openness, more democracy, more trust. Or the young survivor who summed it up, still standing shivering with a blanket around her: When one man can have such a hate, imagine how much love we all can create.

Each one of the killed young people could be our son, our daughter. But this is not the case of the assassin, who needs so badly media cover. Let us not give it to him. Let us further ask what we have done to fill the empty spaces between our homes, where we have raised peace-loving children, who respect all living beings, and the hate incubators. The issue may be more complicated that the insight that such creatures, which can kill young people in cold blood, had not enough love. It does not matter so much what such beings failed to get. It matters rather where our responsibility – not guilt – lies from now on.

Is it suitable to say now “All of us are Norwegians”? I do not know. Anyhow, I do not feel this way. And this has nothing to do with a deep concern about what happened to those wonderfully engaged girls and boys. Neither can we ever be sure that such a dreadful action would not happen elsewhere – it did often happen elsewhere, it will happen again elsewhere. Even next to our home – let us keep being realistic, most of all in order not to panic unnecessarily.

Have we become more vulnerable since July 22? I cannot answer to that – but would just like to wish that we have become more attentive to each sign of lack of communication, of isolation, of misunderstanding, all the situations that are thresholds of violence outbursts. But after the waves of violence, it is in our hands to keep moving within the waves of care for the world.

TS