11 September 2001

Two little boys are playing aeroplanes. They rush around the street making aircraft noises, swooping and diving ... one brings his hand down to the curb in a film-style aircraft crash. Boom .... and then they move on to another fantasy world: in this one they are formula 1 racing champions.

Nothing particularly remarkable there ... street life playing itself out. Children in their own world. Yet I was viewing it differently. For me it wasn't a simple, childish act, but played out something deeper and more disturbing. The reason for the change of perspective? Well there were two. The first being a visit to an Anne Frank exhibition in Beverley Minster.

The story of Anne Frank is well known: a family in Germany are forced to flee the Nazis in the years before WWII. They have just set up their normal lives again in Amsterdam, when the war catches up with them and they are forced into hiding in their own office. Then the waiting ... for that inevitable day when they are betrayed. The hope is gone and they become another statistic of a monstrous political idea.

And the second reason? I was travelling back home, thinking over meaning of the exhibition, when I heard on the local radio station the news of the deliberate aircraft crashes on the world trade centre. The same fervour, the same madness had gripped some group of fanatics and had driven them to use a civilian airliner as a weapon.

The events may be more than 50 years apart but the same insanity is still loose in the world. A belief system that is so extreme that it almost has its own life and existence, and is able to completely override the natural instincts of self-protection and empathy for others. As the world becomes smaller, the mindgames of someone you do not even know the name of, may turn into your reality.

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