I made the mistake of reading this on the BBC website today.
And I don’t think I’ve ever hated humanity more than I do right now.
The process of simply buying the Xbox One took me either three days or eight weeks, depending on how you look at it, due to a combination of how retail works these days and the gibbering random madness that is GAME's pricing and corporate structure. But I'm not even going to get into that here.
What you should know is what happened next.
I wish I didn't have to write what I'm about to write. There's no possible benefit to it for me. All it will bring me is hatred, abuse and threats, some from people whose feelings I care about. It won't make any difference to anything, because only a handful of people will ever read it and most of those who do will be outraged by it. But I have to do it anyway. I'm trapped – trapped by conscience, trapped by sanity, and trapped by the words of the smartest, most perceptive writer who ever lived.
"Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations." (George Orwell)
On the 15th of April 1989, ninety-six people went to a football match and didn't come home. They died in hideous scenes which were broadcast to the world and splashed across newspaper front pages, and they died as a result of a catastrophic combination of circumstances, which had any one of them not been present would have averted the disaster. Yet of all those factors, there's one that nobody is allowed to talk about, despite the fact that it's the one that actually killed every single victim.
Damn everyone whose cowardice means that the burden of saying so has landed on someone as stupid, inappropriate and hopelessly ill-equipped for the task as me.
Warning: the following piece contains distressing images.
"…don't you ever / Lower yourself, forgetting all your standards"
:(
Hello. I am the Rev. Stuart Campbell,
a semi-obsolete neo-culture journalist.
Click here to contact me, if you want.
Lightforce (FTL, 1986)
