We Won’t Let the Manchester Attack Break Our Spirits

It wasn’t meant to be this way. An otherwise celebratory Ariana Grande arena show in Manchester on Monday night mutated into the site of a suicide bombing, targeting children, young teens, LGBT people – the bulk of Grande fans – as well as their parents and partners. I’ll leave the speculation to those on social media recklessly choosing not to heed the advice of the police. There is no place for finger-pointing right now. There’s just the silence as you process the news stories, wish you hadn’t watched shaky videos from the night, think of those who will never see their loved ones alive again.

So no, this isn’t the time to turn grief into a tool for manipulation. The best we can do is allow ourselves the space to understand the impact of more than 20 people killed and more than 50 injured, among them children. This is a time to listen, rather than hypothesise, and hold onto the warmth and revelry that anyone who saved up for gig tickets as a teen, obsessively listening to the artist beforehand, will remember.

Really, this was an attack on the gut-lurching, giddy joy of being a kid at a show. There may well have been people at Grande’s concert who had just enjoyed their first gig, their first arena show, their first glimpse of an international pop star somewhere near their hometown. Their memories of Monday night will likely always be steeped in trauma. In the press more broadly, we have a responsibility to try and minimise that trauma by reporting with sensitivity and backing off those close to the attack who don’t want to engage with the media. As a music outlet in particular, we stand by Manchester. We won’t bow to people who want to make us afraid, who hope to disrupt our lives for good, who wish we didn’t step out into the dimming evening light ready to sing along to dizzying pop from that place in our chests where it doesn’t matter whether we sound good or not. We won’t back down to people who try to wield terror as a weapon against us being ourselves, and enjoying ourselves.

Read the rest on Noisey.