Day 3, and life moves on. I haven’t cried yet. I’m waiting for the moment to come when I break down and weep, but it hasn’t happened yet. I feel somewhat emotionally barren. I haven’t really had a strong emotional reaction yet.
I’ve seen many moving things in the past couple of days. Yesterday we went to a pub in town with some people, to have a drink and talk things over. We went to the cathedral, too, where people have been laying down flowers and lighting candles since they could get close enough to do so. It was really touching how many people wanted to remember and do something for everyone we’ve lost. But I didn’t start crying.
This photo, by Tommy Ellingsen, that’s been floating around the web, depicts the prime minister hugging the leader of AUF and is fantastically moving and beautiful, but it wasn’t enough to make me cry.
When I was watching the news on Friday, and blogging here and trying to keep up with everything, I didn’t cry either. I got upset, and tired, and when the death toll from Utøya started coming in I felt really sick, but it was like I wouldn’t let the sadness in.
Today I went to church, as we were having a short memorial service. I lit candles, and we sang hymns, and there were lots of people grieving and crying, even though they didn’t know anyone who’d been hurt in the attacks. I didn’t. I just stood there, with my candle lit, singing along and trying to listen to the message our priest was trying to get across to us, but I just felt emotionally cold. Like there was nothing there.
I’m not very religious. I was raised Eastern Orthodox, since I was about eight, and even before that I had a lot of Christian influences in my life. When I was a kid it was easy to believe, to take the church and the hymns and everything at face value. I felt proud to be a part of that community, happy to go to church every Sunday, I participated in everything I could and I loved it. Then I grew up, and I started having doubts. I know it’s perfectly natural to have doubts, but the more I think about it the more I feel like I wasn’t supposed to be religious. I still believe in God – or some sort of God, anyway – but I don’t feel at home in a church anymore. I don’t feel like I belong.
I thought that today might be different. I truly believed that today I would walk into that room and feel something. But I didn’t, really. I just felt empty.
My city and my country has changed forever. Yesterday I saw armed soldiers protecting parliament and guarding the closed off areas. This is Oslo, no one carries firearms here. It’s surreal and just really crazy. I miss my town, I want it back, but nothing is ever gonna be the same again now…
Yesterday at the pub, we started talking about how Breivik is likely to be punished. The maximum prison sentence in Norway is 21 years, but we also have something called “forvaring”, which I suppose could be translated to “custody”, which means that even when he’s completed that sentence, if he’s not deemed fit to return to society he’ll stay locked up. Theoretically, he could stay in jail indefinitely. Still, some people were saying how we should change our laws and extend the 21 years. My friend Ted said something very clever to that. He said that we shouldn’t let this pissant change the way we think. We shouldn’t let him change our laws or our compassion or the way our country works, because if we do, then he’s won.
This is in agreement with what the prime minister said Friday night. That our response to this tragedy should not be revenge, but an even more open, even more democratic society than we already have.
One of these days all this is gonna sink in, probably while I’m completing a totally mundane task like cooking or doing the dishes or hoovering the bedroom (if I ever get round to that, it’s overdue) and I’m gonna break down completely. For now I’ll just have to try to ignore this feeling in the pit of my stomach and hope that I’ll feel something soon.
Last photo by imzadi755.
6 Comments
Maybe it “just” means that I’m high-functioning sociopathic, but I don’t tend to feel grief for the death of strangers either (friends anr relative yes, but not strangers, including celebrities). Anger, and maybe even outrage at the [multiple censored, in several languages] who killed them or who’s negligence (corporate or individual) caused the accident that killed them, but not grief.
In the main I’d agree with you about criminal justice, but I feel that there ought to be an availability of “extraordinary punishments for extraordinary acts”, like “lock them up and lose the key”, and this is so definitely an extraordinary act. Of course, like most Britons under 50, I’ve lived with some sort of spectre of terrorism for pretty much my whole life, so I do have a different perspective on this from what you do.
I feel all those things, grief included, I just don’t feel them right away.
As far as locking him up and losing the key, since that’s really what’s going to happen, and he’s most likely gonna get locked up for the rest of his life anyway, I don’t really care that he’s in theory only getting 21 years.
I learned even before I went to the UK that Norwegians have an entirely different attitude to crime and punishment than most Brits. Even the most liberally-minded on the subject usually still have a more vengeful approach than we do. I think this is partially because of the media, and partially just a cultural thing. (These are broad generalisations, of course. There ARE people here who would take that kind of approach as well, just as there are people in the UK who wouldn’t.)
One example of this is those two kids who killed that toddler all those years ago. They were just children when it happened, and whether or not they truly understood what they’d done at the time, a lot happens to a person’s brain chemistry and general world view during their teens and early young adult years. When they were let out, the consensus here in Norway was that they were probably rehabilitated and that they should be allowed to try and live normal lives. In Britain, the media went out for blood, tracking down the toddler’s mother and asking her how she felt about this, and she obviously felt that they should be locked up for the rest of their lives, and even tried to track down the two boys, under their new identities, in order to expose them to the public. The general consensus in the UK seemed to be that it didn’t matter one bit whether the boys had been rehabilitated or not; they should still continue to be punished.
In the main I tend to go for the view of “compensatory punishment” rather than “penetant punishment”. That is, if you do something wrong, you have to compensate the wronged party (or their next of kin) for your offence. That can even work in the case of murder of an individual, but when the death toll is in the 90s, not so much.
You’ve also touched on just why I hate our tabloid newspapers so much, particularly in your last paragraph. Of course, one of the 2 you’re talking about has since been convicted on paedophilia charges, which I hope explains my view that I want convincing that the rehabilitation has worked pre-release.
Also, over on Scandanavia and the World, I’ve left a comment (under my KenO persona) where I’ve just tried to cuddle an entire nation in the hope of making them feel better.
I liked that, it was nice.
By the way, it came to my attention a couple of days ago that some of the less extreme and trollish posters from PK have made a forum. Specifically, dan_144, I believe. I’ve joined, and it’s really nice! We’re having some very productive and nice discussions. You should come join us!
http://lowdownpolitic.comxa.com/index.php
Thanks for that. Incidentally, politics-wise, I’m generally very liberal (yes small “l”), but with occasional hard-right views, mostly on people who would try and steal our freedoms and the sort of sub-human who says things like “we can not kill too many of them”.
I don’t think that’s really so hard-right, more like slightly authoritarian. The left-right scale is really quite flawed.