London, a Deeper Horror Than We Might Think

By Simon Conway

Thursday, May 23, 2013

The horrific scenes on a London street yesterday where Islamic terrorists butchered an unarmed soldier left me with more questions than answers. But maybe not the obvious ones.

Let me backtrack first. I was born in London. This is my hometown. This is the place that when I grew up, if you saw someone attacking someone else, then you did something about it. This is especially true if there were lots of onlookers.

This is the country I chose to leave because it was slowly becoming unrecognizable to me. And I know in my heart that if you transplanted that atrocious scene on a London street yesterday, to an American street today, then the outcome would have been entirely different. People, as they did in Boston, would run TOWARDS the danger.

So what happened yesterday? What could possess a crowd to watch two men with knives and machetes hack to death another human being? And why was the only reaction to pull out phones and shoot pictures and video? How could these people then wait 20 minutes for the police to show up without any attempt to take down these terrorists?

It took most of the day for me to reach my conclusion, but I have arrived at something that is really quite uncomfortable - more so because we here in the United States are currently headed down the same path. We might be 10 or 15 or even 20 years away, but unless we change direction then we too will simply record an event and do nothing to try and save another human being.

What am I talking about? Some of you might call it socialism, but whatever label you give it, Britain is now a country that is completely dependent on government. Government will take care of me; government knows best; government has my best interests at heart; government will be here in 20 minutes to deal with these terrorists.

And when you point that out - as I did yesterday on Twitter - then the Brits will fall on you. If you dare to suggest that slain soldier might be alive today if only there were some good guys with guns on the scene at the time, you are told “we don’t want to live in the wild west", or my personal favorite "a good person wouldn't have a gun. The armed trained police need to have guns and that's it" You might also be called a "retard" and a moron (as I was) for pointing out that the "armed trained police" took 20 minutes to get there.

Ever since I have been on the air here, I have pointed out to my audiences that I have lived through where we are headed.

But I never lived through this. I don’t understand the “roll camera” mentality when someone is being butchered before your very eyes.

There’s one picture I’ve seen of one of the terrorists with at least 17 people in the background. All I can think of are the last heard words of 9-11 hero Todd Beamer on Flight 93.

"Are you guys ready? Let's roll"

He wasn’t talking about video cameras.