Loathing, but who?

I live in a quiet, guilty kind of fear – the kind that makes me hold my breath ever so slightly, tense a little, cringe a little, shut my eyes tightly in a childish belief that this will keep them (and me) safe, or at least ignorant until it’s too late.

But it’s quiet, and secret, and no one quite knows about it. My breathing doesn’t quicken, nor do my jaws clench, and I try to look like I’m simply dozing and not shutting out the world.

All this, because of random news pieces and an e-mail I received (who believes in e-mails nowadays? Who doesn’t?), cool words and disassociated tones that starkly meant my route to work every morning makes me a potential target thanks to an unavoidable station skirting the heart of town.

And so every day I cringe a little more and wonder a little longer if I’d see or hear it coming, if I’d feel it, and how much, but then nothing happens and I can breathe again. Yet the day seems a little bleaker for the fear.

It makes me a little angrier, too, and snappish. I read comments in the paper saying we shouldn’t let the fears control our lives, that we should go on as we always have and show them we’re not afraid – and then I feel a curling sneer when just below it says “Ballarat”, or somewhere similarly far away from it all. I want to yell, then, “What do you know?” and “You have no right”.

I now nudge my way through crowds, ever moving ever slipping in between the cracks; all I want to do is get out of here, and I couldn’t care less about you.

Anyone swarthily foreign is instantly suspicious, and rapidly avoided. I now find a new abhorrence towards anything religious; the frequent borderline fanaticism and the potential for perversion to neatly fit human insanity is ever now forefront in my mind.

At times I wish the government hadn’t done anything, had just stepped back and left the rest of the world alone.

And I know, I know, oh God I know, just how irrational and stupid I’m being. I spend so little real time at that station that my fears are basically groundless. People are not callous, but concerned. Racism is ugly, even in the smallest forms. Religion is a tree, a rock, a mountain that anchors most of the world and keeps us sane and gives us hope; it is but a tiny few who wield broken branches and throw sharpened stones. Doing what needs to be done, even flawed, is necessary and far better than doing nothing to help at all.

And so this, this is why I hate terrorists.

Because they, and the things they do or say they will have made me into this…coward, selfish and despicable. What is worse is that perhaps I always was one, but simply never knew.

See, some days it seems all I care about now is me, but it’s a me I don’t recognize, a me I don’t even like.

And so perhaps, in some small way, they’ve killed me already.