I’m a 40-year-old Irishman in the Netherlands having nightmares about a truck tearing through people in Nice. I haven’t watched the videos, I haven’t seen extensive pictures, I have just read the news reports and I am haunted by them. I dreamt my own version, on a scale I could actually comprehend. In my dream, a truck cut through a small group at night on a college campus. Two dead, one close friend missing. I dreamt of decapitation, of the mangled torso of the vibrant young person I had just been speaking to.
It’s perhaps dangerous to label the actions of a lone male running amok a terrorist act. But what we do seem to be at the epicentre of is a crisis of masculinity amidst the lightning transmission of an idea delivered straight to your phone. The idea is this: if you are a young man who has yet to make his mark on the world, if no one shows you the respect you think you deserve, if the object of your desire rejects you or she no longer wants you, then you can dress up your murderous rage as an act of honour, that you can gain the recognition in death that you have never received in life.
If any older person encourages these thoughts, stokes these urges and then promises you a heavenly reward, he or she is lying to you. It is the same lie that every warring nation peddles to its recruits: that they will go down as history’s heroes. You know he or she is lying because they are not willing to do it themselves. They are even more cowardly than you.
The only way to combat this idea is through overwhelming, implacable love. Not a love of religion, not a love of country, not a love of race and not just a heterosexual love. And not merely a tribal love of your own family either, or of your own community. That’s too easy. It’s love and care for everyone. Every human on this planet is the same species that you are and now is the time to decide whether we are doomed to mutually assured destruction or not. Is it to be annihilation because of a suicidal impulse? Is this innate? Is it genetic? If so, you have it and I know I have it. Will we last fifty years? Will we last ten?
To many eyes including our own, Western culture must look inherently corrupt, like some deranged US high school where ugly slogans are chanted to drown out truth, vicious bullying is rife, the students expect to get paid for looking pretty rather than for any achievements and sex could seem the only currency left, were it not for the hard cash spent on the cars and the clothes. But despite all of this vacuous idiocy, there is still much to be celebrated about Europe and indeed the United States. Wouldn’t you like the freedom to choose the kind of work you’re suited for, the kind of family life you want, the kind of culture you wish to create? Or would you prefer to cede your power to make those choices to the same elder whispering to you about your death parade? If you kill others and then yourself, you forever deny them and you the joy of experiencing music, story and Art. All of which are just means of communicating with other people, living and dead. Of loving them. Multicultural societies can exist. But they can only exist if you decide not to take out your knife, pull the trigger, to turn your steering wheel towards the lip of the kerb.
The Western elites’ treatment of their underclasses has been shameful and re-commencing right now renewed efforts must be put into job creation, into overtly vocational education, into combatting discrimination and into legislating for equality of opportunity. If you are willing to create and not destroy, if you are willing to make true sacrifices and delay the gratification of your wishes by working for them, by earning them, then some of the doors that are closed to you will open. Not all, but some. One is enough to build a life upon and you will have turned the key yourself.
However, if you think that things have just gone too far, that women should know their place, that whatever racial minority you view as beneath your own should be doing work you consider yourself above or that gay people shouldn’t flaunt their sexuality in front of you, you are wrong. If you think that teaching acceptance of everyone whoever they are, including you, is evidence of weakness, you are wrong.
You will find that my capacity for hatred, for blood-letting, for revenge more than equals your own. That is what I’m afraid of. For we will both die screaming.