Electronic Space Nintendo

The past couple of days have been, in a word, dreamlike. It’s taken at least a full day for the reality, and gravity of the situation to sink in. But I want to start at the beginning.

The preceding week was all upside down. I came down with a cold and fever on Monday, and my girlfriend followed soon after. With the requisite cough-driven sleeplessness, our clock spun uncontrollably. We’d go to bed at 7 in the morning and wake up at night.

This Friday afternoon, we were shaken out of our sleep by a violent bang and our slightly-ajar bedroom windows shaking so hard in their frame we thought they might fall out. In that sleep state, we were obviously shocked awake, but we didn’t fully understand what had happened. For all we knew, it was just an unusually hard rush of wind, which of course turned out to be the case. We made jokes about our enormous cats attacking the windows to catch flies and went back to dozing.

The sirens soon followed. Sirens aren’t uncommon as we live downtown. There were a lot of them though, and I sleepily made the dumb joke that “I guess them done found themselves a negro!” It didn’t stop though. More sirens. Police sirens, ambulance sirens, fire sirens. Even a siren I don’t even know what is. I dug out my phone and looked up the news, and read the first report of a large explosion downtown.

Now we live literally 3 minutes walk away from the site in question. It’s a street I walk frequently, where my friends walk frequently. It’s around the corner, up a hill and take a left. Now I was being confronted with images of that well known, safe and quiet area in a state I couldn’t even begin to comprehend.

Terrorism is a constant topic in Norway. There’s a distinct Norwegian undercurrent of somehow being entangled with the US, and following 9/11,  as we are close allies having partaken in joint armed conflict, the fear that Norway could become a target for Jihadist terrorism has been a frequent topic. Personally I have thought the notion was ridiculous. If anything, Jihadists should LOVE Norway. It’s the perfect neutral staging area. Any terrorist attack on Norway would be, I think (perhaps naively), condemned even by the Jihadists: They have too much to gain from us remaining unaffected.

So when I’m being shown a terrorist attack on my city, my brain flies into analysis mode. Perhaps that’s the programmer in me; I take refuge in abstract thought and problem solving. A block away, people are dead and dying, and I’m instead sitting safe in my beautiful home, considering what kind of explosive might have been used, why the location was picked, why  there’s so much office-supply debris if the detonation happened street level. My brain simply treated the situation the same way it did during 9/11, when I was trying to figure out how on earth the towers could fall.

Friday was spent in disbelief, watching the news, flicking between CNN and Norwegian media, even making jokes about inaccuracies in the international pronunciation of Norwegian names.

(As a sidenote, on Twitter, someone became enraged that people were making jokes, and I was livid. Don’t you dare tell me I can’t make jokes when I’m nervous and uncertain, you self righteous moralist prick. )

Gradually as the scope of the event became clearer, we were glad so few had passed, and that whoever carried out the attack had chosen such a bad time to cause damage. Relatively speaking, we felt we had got away cheap.

Then the shooting was reported.

The shooting changed everything. As the situation on Utøya escalated, my state of disbelief reached almost a critical state. I became obsessed with theories. I got into heated debates on Facebook and Twitter about socio-political questions of perpetrator identity.

(Many were making assumptions that this was an Al Qaida attack, which I would openly ridicule and make light of. Further, perp ethnicity became a topic, and it was driving me insane. A pet peeve of mine is prejudice and assumption; I believe strongly that people need to eat the world with their own teeth, so to say.)

There was no way for me to bodily walk up and see the site. All I had in reality to make me *feel* the situation was how all traffic in the area had been directed down my street, resulting in a cacophony of engines and sirens outside our windows. The discussion and theory-crafting became more real to me, as the situation’s gravity escaped into the virtual space of news reports and anonymous discussion online.

As more details of the shooting surfaced, I remembered  how small Norway is, and the time interval between the attacks. Me and my girlfriend concluded early and confidently with practically everything that is now known about the perpetrator short of his name and address: We knew this was the bomber, we knew he was Norwegian, and we KNEW he was right-wing. It made too much sense, and I’m ashamed to admit, I was even gloating at the prospect of all those making racially-prejudiced comments against people of foreign ethnicities  in the Oslo streets having to take a long hard look in the mirror and examine their assumptions about the world, and the gray scale of politics.

Armed forces stationed outside parliament

As I was proven to be correct, the “fun bubble” finally popped. The death toll on the island rose as night fell, and certain details such as how this scumbag pretended to be a police officer, deliberately using these desperate kids’ need for safety to murder more of them and how they were targeted for something as mercurial as an interest in politics.. It finally broke me in to realize that this wasn’t just happening. It was happening in my home, to people like me, with my language, my past, my future, and it made me acutely aware of my nationality.

If you’ll allow, I’m going to get a bit new-agey here. There’s something about sharing a “spirit”. We like to think that when a bomb goes off in Iraq and several soldiers are killed, we all empathize equally, but I don’t think we can. Unless we share spirits with those affected, we can’t relate fully and bodily to their experiences. The sadness and grief is always tied to those left behind, and if we can’t put ourselves *precisely* in their place, then I humbly don’t think you can experience the connection as primal as it can get.

I’m a jaded, fatalistic cynic. I’ve been shocked and depressed by terrorism in the past, but I’ve never felt touched by it. I’ve been safe, in my “fun bubble” of analysis and anonymous discussion. Even as we lit candles on our balcony for the victims, we were still discussing and debating the events more than we were genuinely feeling them.

Yet I couldn’t sleep last night. I laid restlessly watching the news over and over again. When the news broke that the Utøya death toll exceeded 80, I thought it had to be some kind of bad joke, or a typo. As the number spread through the news and was confirmed further, I reached a kind of numbness. It wasn’t interesting anymore. It was just painful. A horrible, deep, grinding pain that made the world gray and brittle. It made food, games, literature, everything immaterial.

How can you enjoy anything or even think of anything else when somewhere someone’s mom isn’t answering her son’s calls? When a child warns her parents not to call her for fear that a murderer might notice and find her? When kids swim in ice cold water in the night, trying to pull their wounded friends to safety? When perhaps over 80 families whose lives mirror your own are irreversibly broken, and for what? One man’s belief?

We went for a walk today. Everything is cordoned off, so there wasn’t much to see other than people, rain and armed army personnel. All stores were closed, so everybody outside were in the same confused, curious and disbelieving daze. There was a soft quietness to the city I have never experienced in my life, and as we made a wide circle around the perimeter, I felt both pride and grief. Pride in being born into a country that congeals and gathers to heal itself so whole heartedly, a country where the government takes a back step to the fates of the victims, and a country where, and I really believe this, something like this can happen without breaking our spirits.

Welcome to terror-stricken Oslo

If there is a Norwegian spirit, I think I know it better now than ever before. I’ve never been a flag-waver, even so far as actively avoiding any flagging of any sort: I believe in people more than I believe in borders. But the Norwegian spirit is resoluteness. The ability to be smacked in the mouth, take it and stand proud still. Because we know we are good, and you simply can’t prove us wrong. No matter how many of our innocent young you murder over your petty, infantile “beliefs”.

Norway is small.  Norwegian poet Nordahl Grieg once wrote this. “Vi er så få her i landet, hver fallen er bror og venn”. We are so few in this nation, every fallen is a brother and friend. In 2007, 32 murders were committed in Norway. 90 or more dead in a day is unthinkable.

I once lived in the same block as the murderer, and worked nearby for years. A friend of my girlfriend’s went to high school with him. Her brother once beat him up. Norway is too small for this to happen. We don’t have the “luxury” of bodily mass or distance to cope with such an event. Every death is physically felt. Today, as we saw interviews with trembling, crying kids who have experienced one of the worst and incomprehensible events of violence in Norwegian history, I finally broke and cried.

We won’t change though. That’s not what we do. We don’t raise our fists, if not for rebuilding.

The pitiful mass-murderer, who armed his cowardly self against unarmed children, in the safest most peaceful country on the planet, will experience the horror of anonymity, as his memory will go quietly into the fog like a bad dream. We are better than to give him his due. He will go to trial, and he will spend the rest of his life among people who hate him. His eventual grave will be forgotten and uncared for. His family will cry bitter tears over how he has smeared filth over the gifts they have given him. His chapter is done.

Our chapter begins now, and our job is to defy his will and that of those like him. We’re too good.

I want to tell those who are left behind that I’m there with you to the best of my ability. We’re all together in this, though some of us have carried an unfathomable burden. The rest of us will be there with you, those who passed will never be forgotten. You have become symbols of what we are in this nation, what we fight for, and you won’t be disgraced.