We woke up this morning to the news of bombs going off in another country. Once again transport interchanges have become the scene of mass murder.
In Brussels, as we write, families are trying to find loved ones, a government and security services are trying to protect innocent people from more senseless hate, and emergency services are trying to save those they can. On the news we see people running in terror, but we also see people running to the scene, running to help.
There can be no doubt that since 9/11 the world changed for all of us and people we write for, transport workers, were forced onto the front line in a fight against murderers apparently lacking any mercy or reason. Every bus driver, or rail or airport attendant, will go to work tomorrow knowing that his or her job is to carry on in the face of this.
Transport is about crossing divides, it is about making new connections and bringing people closer together. It is about the sign seen from the window of a passing car or train that reads: ‘Welcome’.
We have shrunk the world to the point that it can fit into the phone in your hand but we have not reduced the distances between us.
However in the last analysis, we should care more about lines in the sand than lines on a map. And when the winds of history blow, they will tear down the walls of division and false divides, they will wipe away such hate and leave it as nothing more than Ozymandias’ pathetic hubris – another bloody lesson learned in our education of what it means to be human. And the innocent and peaceful people of the world will still be standing right next to that line in the sand, which will not have moved one inch.
As the poet T S Eliot said: ‘We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.’
Our travels end when we return home, and have made that place a better home and this world a better place, for all of us.
