There has been a lot of trauma in the UK lately - terrorist attacks in Manchester and London and the fire that engulfed
a tower block in London a few days ago. The terrorist attack in Manchester affected me a lot, as it was at the train station I use regularly to go to my university, and because the suicide bomber lived just a couple of miles away from me. The area where I live in very integrated - on my road, we have Sikhs, Afro-caribbean people, Irish people, Muslims and British white people, and we all get along fine. My kids have friends of all different ethic groups. That’s partly why it was so shocking -
that just two miles away a confused, alienated and brainwashed young man was plotting such a brutal and divisive act.
But there are some positive things that come out of these terrible events. It’s amazing how altruistic people become after tragedies. The innate kindness of human beings manifests itself very powerfully. In Manchester, a
homeless man called Chris Parker was waiting outside the concert arena, and rushed in when he heard the explosion. As he said, “instead of running away, my gut instinct was to run back and try and help.” He saw a young girl who had lost her legs in the blast, wrapped her in a t-shirt and helped her to contact her parents. He comforted an elderly woman who had serious head injures, who died in his arms. Separately, another homeless person named Stephen Jones was sleeping rough near the venue and
also rushed in to help. He found many children covered with blood, screaming and crying. With a friend who accompanied him, they pulled out nails out of the children’s arms - and in one case, out of a child’s face - and helped a woman who was bleeding severely by holding her legs in the air. “It was just my instinct to go and help people out,” he said.
There were countless stories of bravery. An off duty doctor who was walking away from the concert after picking his daughter up ran back into the foyer to help the victims. A woman who saw crowds of confused and frightened teenagers running out of the venue guided around fifty of them to the safety of a nearby hotel. There she shared her phone number on social media so that parents could come and pick their children up. Taxi drivers across the city switched off their meters and
took concertgoers and other members of the public home. Taxi drivers from as far as 30 miles away converged on the city to offer free transport.
To me, all of this proves how absurd it is when scientists suggest that human beings are innately selfish, and try to explain away altruism as a kind of mistake (or disguised form of egoism). We human
beings are always deeply interconnected. This is how we can sense each other’s suffering. We share the same essence of being, and so when others feel pain, we feel it too. And that triggers an instinct to try to alleviate other people’s pain, as we would try to alleviate our own pain. We become prepared to sacrifice our own safety - even our own lives - for the sake of others, because we sense that we actually are them. In everyday life, when things are running smoothly and normally,
it’s easy for us to switch into a self-centred mode, in which our own needs and desires take precedence. But crises and tragedies reawaken us to our innate connectedness.
Another positive aspect is that, in a related way, tragedies and crises link communities together. In the same way that when an individual person experiences trauma, they may shift
into a higher state of being, a collective tragedy can shift a whole community into a higher level. What used to be a group of individuals living separate lives and barely acknowledging each other, can became a much more cohesive community, united by their shared sorrow and grief. Barriers break down, petty resentments fade away, and a new sense of empathy and trust develops. On an individual level, this is sometimes called post-traumatic growth. But whole communities can certainly experience
this too. And perhaps even a whole nation - perhaps even a whole world.
