SO offended...

Wow, some people are touchy. It seems like everyone is too easily offended these days, both in The Job and in real life. We'd a tricky and unpleasant day at work recently and, as is common in such situations, somebody made a very quiet and inappropriate joke. Other people laughed at that joke, partly because it was funny, and - more - to release the tension. Typically a civvy tutted and harumphed [and why is it always a civvy or a vaulting careerist that is the first to "tut" and harumph, usually then to look around to see who had seen them challenge the inappropriate joke?].

Death and viscera are always nasty and usually leave the ghost images in your brain for ever, but what are we supposed to do? Cry and bawl when we have a job to do? Beat our brows and say how sad we are, dwell on things and suffer nightmares at night? Or release some of the tension and have a guilty giggle to shoo off the demons and let us get on with the job until we get to go home and think over what happened, or drink, or perhaps think kindly of, or say prayers for the person we laughed at that day?

But it's easy to get offended and look down on your colleagues from the moral high ground. In the end, it's generally the officers, and not the civvies and vaulting careerists that are still on the crime scene, getting their hands and trousers dirty and trying to keep breathing through their mouths and not their noses.

Likewise the reaction of much of the Muslim community worldwide to the Pope's recent speech. If any of the people complaining about the speech had actually read the full text, they might have seen that it referred to a discourse from centuries ago, that the Pope's debate hinges around faith and compulsion, and he quotes that the originator of the discourse passage that so offended so many who hadn't even read it, did so with "startling brusqueness". He talks about Greek philosophy, the age of reason, and in the end invites an intelligent dialogue between cultures.

Now some people with bigger egos than intellects have decided that in quoting the Byzantine Emperor Manuel Paleologus in a discussion, the Pope is endorsing the Mediaeval view, that he's saying that all Muslims are violent. Now this would not in itself be news, but what have so many undereducated and manipulated Muslims decided to do, presumably to attempt to disprove the violence that the Pope has (not actually) associated with a minority of morons who believe everything they're told about Islam without actually reading the words of their Prophet (or in fact any words that might challenge their closed minds)?

• Burned effigies of the Pope in India and elsewhere
• Burned and fired weapons at Christian churches in the Israeli occupied territories
• Killed an elderly nun in Somalia (well done, you killed an old lady - like she wrote any of these speeches)
• Attacked a church in Iraq
• Tried to force apology after apology (rings a familiar bell?)

So let me get this straight, you've done all these things in order to prove that you're not violent? Well Gosh, I'm certainly persuaded - what could possibly be more pacifist??! QED mate, QED.

I'd like to suggest to everyone that they learn to shrug, laugh, think, reason, empathise, sympathise and try to understand.

Now Dummies back in prams please, everyone!