Some things in life are difficult to think about, you’d prefer they weren’t there, that you could turn your head away.
But life isn’t simple, it isn’t right, it certainly isn’t fair.
It might seem like an odd thing to have at a festival, but it says so much about the punk community that space was given to a heart-breaking conversation between John Robb and the mother of Sophie Lancaster, who was brutally killed for doing nothing wrong. She was killed for ‘being different’.
This can’t have been an easy conversation, so I have a lot of respect for both John Robb and Sophie’s mother for doing it, and being so sensitive.
We’ll put a link up on the site with more information about this tragic case. One of the positive outcomes is that people are being educated about hate crimes. As Sophie’s mother pointed out, as a society we have made great strides towards tackling racism and sexism but it is still easy to slip into lazy ways of thinking, of taking things for granted. How easily we make human beings who we don’t see as ‘being like us’ into OTHERS. And that’s a narrow way of looking at the world, and as Sophie’s death proves, the consequences can be tragic.
http://www.sophielancasterfoundation.com
Michael
