You Can’t Get It Back
I was at home on the couch wearing a child’s grin, gorging on everybody’s wonderful and gorgeous reports from our parade, when I heard something bad had happened. After a worried check-in with my people in town, who were all safe and weren’t nearby but knew all about it, I spent a few anxious minutes hoping that maybe it was an accident or that it wasn’t “so bad,” before the awful thing itself appeared in my feed. (Here and as much as I can, I will heed this wise advice, and I suggest you do as well.)
And so what was until then a lovely and deserved day out, a gift to remember and revisit on a gray day, became trauma and anger and confusion.
I started writing this on Monday afternoon, my hand and my phone still shaking with updates from friends there and here trying to process their outrage and disbelief as I shared my own. It did not help that every attempt at refreshing the feed for the tiniest nugget of reliable information was rewarded with hacks and ghouls flogging their preferred narrative – a shameful display, from some who claim themselves as our own, that even the deliberate revelation from Merseyside Police that the attempted murder suspect is a 53-year old white British man did not halt.
I revisited this again on Tuesday, after learning that out of the roughly 50 people injured by a man who chose to drive a passenger vehicle into a crowd of people, “only” 11 are still in the hospital and all are in stable condition.
“Only” 11. That’s “good” if you zoom out far enough, to the terrible things that have haunted Liverpool Football Club for decades, and try to play a nasty dead-end game of comparisons. It may be “good” if you take the pessimist’s view and recognize that with hundreds of thousands of people out in the streets, without the phalanx of bystanders and police who apparently stopped the vehicle, it could have been worse.
What “good” there is came – as it always does – from the helpers, who showed us yet again how strong this community is, how generous and genuine and kind they make people on Merseyside and how, against all of current-stage capitalism’s odds, that ethos appears to have been exported around the world. I was not surprised to see posts offering rides or shelter to complete strangers stuck in town. I am awed that I saw so many.
In the days since I’ve seen the players, the club, and the rest of us try to pull off a delicate maneuver: not moving on from what happened, but making sure to look past it when possible. When you do, you see Curtis Jones rapping. You see Mo Salah getting rizzed up while in traffic. You wonder how wasted Wataru Endo must be. You are reminded that all the good and fine and silly things still happened, and they can and should be enjoyed on their own terms.
This is happening because we are part of a broad organization that knows only too well exactly what a tragedy is. In an earlier draft, instead of “trauma and anger and confusion,” I wrote “tragedy and grief and loss.” I changed it because I am aware of the quantifiably worse things Liverpool the city and the club specifically have suffered in our lifetimes. I wanted to consciously avoid any whiff of a comparison to Hillsborough because this is not that.
Yet the thing is there and it must be reckoned with. The people there on Water Street witnessed a very ugly scene. There are still people in the hospital, when there should be none. There should be zero people rewarded with physical pain and mental anguish for wanting to be part of the global community that sprang up from the weird little gritty port city. Even more of our people than before will want to avoid crowds and will think twice about attending this or any other parade. Something was still taken away.
We still don’t know much about why this happened. I suspect there won’t ever be a satisfactory answer, other than the life lesson that visits us all: bad things happen to good people at good times for no reason at all, and a good thing can be taken away and tainted very quickly. The more we learn, the more it sounds like an already addled mind, further confused and agitated by the power of a massive crowd, making a series of increasingly bad decisions.
That in a lot of ways is the scariest thing: the line separating someone having a bad day from many, many people having the worst day of their lives is miniscule. But you can have only one worst day. You can have lots of good ones. One reason why the crowd was so big on Monday is because this is a community that knows the value of something good and how rarely it comes along. We are not jaded into decadence. May we never reach that place.
I think we won’t. The BBC’s Ali Gordon interviewed Jack Trotter and Abbie Callaghan on Tuesday, two fans from Northern Ireland who, as they recounted in a remarkably collected account, had been out for nine hours that day, singing and shouting in the drizzle, before the van appeared.
"With what happened, I've never went from euphoria to zero real, real quick, if that makes sense,” said Jack Trotter, who spent the night in the hospital and is on crutches after getting hit.
That is the warning. It was Abbie who despite the shock and the trauma offered the wisdom.
"Keep your loved ones close, that's the main thing," she said. "Honestly, you just have to be grateful ... and realise that it can all be taken away from you so quickly."
