Meet him.
Not Black, not Muslim, not Latino.
Not trans, not immigrant, not gay.
Not a card-carrying revolutionary,
not the frothing caricature you wanted.
Just a typical, homegrown lad,
straight as a plumb line,
a son, a brother, a suitor, a mate, refined by a conservative hearth—
and such hands are pulling the trigger.

So what now?
Do you stitch another fence from your fears?
Raise another shibboleth?
Wave another flag, red or blue,
as though stitched cloth could cauterise the wound?
You think radicalisation redeems?
You think polarisation purifies?
Antiquity laughs in the physiognomy of your illusions.
From Belfast to Bosnia,
from Rwanda to Westminster’s own whispering antechambers,
blood has always flowed
when men mistook categories for causes.

It is easy to mourn the dead,
to canonise them in marble prose,
to cry martyr, saint, beloved.
But brave you admit
that their words, their deeds, their ideology
cut others to ribbons while they yet breathed?
Valiant you hold paradox in your palm—
to love the slain and still
recognise the lesions they left behind?
Or must you always polish the past
until it gleams in a single colour?

Why does compassion crumble
the moment it meets conflict?
Why do we, clever apes,
demand a world painted in absolutes—
black or white, villain or angel—
when the truth is muddier,
a swamp of motives,
a cesspit of contradictions?

Unconditional love—
is it sermon or substance?
Does it mean to embrace
the murderer and the mourners alike,
to carry both insult and affection,
venom and antidote,
as though they were salt crystals upon the tongue?
And yet—
a pinch of salt, we say,
British understatement camouflaging despair:
It’s all good, baby, baby.
But is it?
Tell that to Gaza’s children.
Tell that to the mother of Stephen Lawrence.
Tell that to the father who buried his boy
after Columbine, after Sandy Hook,
after Uvalde, after London Bridge.
Is it all good?
Or is that phrase a nostrum,
smoothing over jagged veracity?

I ask you—
what if the problem is not extremism
but our refusal to sit in dissonance,
to experience its bitterness,
to accept that love must live with critique,
that empathy must coexist with resentment?
What if accord will never be built
from symmetry or certainty,
but from the messy work of holding opposites
without breaking?

So take your slogans, your scapegoats,
your shrill chants of “them” and “us,”
and taste them—
with a pinch of salt.
Swallow, if you dare.
It will burn on the lingua and glossa.
It will make you question
whether you have ever truly thought,
or only borrowed thought from louder voices.
It will make you squirm,
because exactitude is no banquet—
it is gristle, sinew, bone.
And it is yours to chew.

Once, the patterns were legible.
The habitual offender.
The ideologue nursing his factional frenzy.
The broken soul, warped by trauma or twisted chemistry.
We could explain them away—
file them neatly under pathology or politics.

But now?
Now the face is familiar.
The figure is camouflaged as a friend,
a neighbour who mows the lawn,
the colleague who shares your tea break,
the classmate who once copied your notes.

And when such a countenance turns,
when such a hand clenches around the firearm,
what excuse remains?
What comfort in the old categories?
What shield against the statistic
that the monstrous now wears
the pretence of the prototypical?

So I ask—
If the neighbour becomes the threat, who remains neighbour?
If the scholar becomes the killer, who remains wise?
If the ordinary becomes the executioner, what remains of the ordinary?
And if the veneer of normality can hide anything—
how long before it hides you?

Which brings us to the final, most unforgiving inquest.
People act as they do because people are pushed—
pushed against walls, pushed into corners,
pushed until the mind itself buckles under the strain.

Violence, we are told, erupts only when there is no other way out.
Yet irony mocks us:
it is often the free, the strong, the educated—
those with choices—that lift the weapon.
For you cannot expect the man, the woman, the child in Gaza,
starved of agency and shackled by rubble,
to redraw the law with their bare hands.

So why, then, are those who might have chosen amity
driven to the brink of madness?
Why do those with liberty squander it on bullets?
Should those who push not have learnt from history?
For history speaks, again and again:
whatever you sow—courtesy or cruelty,
mercy or malice— ricochets to you a hundredfold.
And if today resistance rises like smoke,
it is only because tirades of turbulence
were thundered from pulpits and podiums.

So the query stands, unresolved, unavoidable:
How do we bring kindness into a world
so fluent in fury?
How do we restrain the hand
before it clenches into a fist?
How do we calm the earth, unsettled and quaking,
when our very values tremble like sand?
What is ethics, what is morality,
if not the courage to refuse the cycle of return?
And if we cannot answer—
what hope remains of peace at all?