I probably don’t have much to say about the bombings in London that you probably haven’t already seen elsewhere.

The media coverage has been naturally irresponsible (on CNN
international, which I can get here: linking the bombings to the G8
meetings or the Olympic announcement without any evidence whatsoever;
repeatedly trying to elicit feelings of anger and hate from the
survivors; treating this one ratings-grabbing incident as if it’s the
only thing that happened on Earth for the last 48 hours; etc.).  The
politicians have been entirely predictable in seizing on the tragedy to
advance whatever their position was before the event.  Comments from
fellow Americans I’ve encountered have been deeply disappointing,
occasionally even calling for nothing short of genocide against entire
peoples they know little about.

All of this is pretty much what you’d expect, I guess.  It’s all bullshit as usual.  And I don’t know what I’d add. 

But I do know somebody with a more direct experience, and what he has
to say gives me a bit of hope.  Maybe it’ll do the same for you.

It’s a measure of how small this planet really is, once you start
wandering a little, that at the moment I first heard of the tragedy, I
was actually wearing a shirt with the British Transport Police logo. 
It’s a recent gift from my Aussie friend Jono, who is currently working
for the BTP in London and just two weeks ago gave me the nickel tour of
the place.

Jono and I met up that afternoon, in fact, near his office, which is about a block from where the bus was blown up.

There’s a shady little park right there.  Jono tells me that this park
contains a peace memorial of the Hiroshima bombing and a statue of
Gandhi.

These monuments are now accompanied by nearby bits of shrapnel from a civilian bus.

Goddammit.  I am so sick of irony being this brutal.

After a bunch of tied-up international phone lines and bad cell
connections, I finally got to talk with Jono tonight.  It feels like
the kind of evening you’d buy your friend a whole series of beers and
sit around just venting.

The guy has a right to vent.  Jono and his office mates were not only
the government agency most directly concerned with the tragedy, but
also physically dead damn in between all the big kabooming.

So Jono knows vastly more than I do about all this.  What follow are
his words, from an email he sent to friends around the world to let
them know he’s OK, which he has kindly allowed me to excerpt at length: