Your belief, your worldview, what you know to be true is a complicated poison indeed.
I watched last weekend with deep, deep sadness the scenes from Catalonia, not least from Girona where Craig and I had been cycling the weekend before.
Catalonia has become very close to my heart in recent years, I have been there three times in the last 15 months and I work with Beatriz Sanchez who trained in Barcelona.
The tension, the depth of feeling, the righteousness was clear when we were there last week. You could taste it. The yes Si banners were everywhere. We even cycled past people painting murals on walls.
The scenes were terrible, my daughter Grace and I watched video after video of police hitting passive protestors sitting in schools over the head with batons and dragging them out by their hair. I watched men with their hands above their heads being hit in the face with police batons.
It is never acceptable to break the law to uphold the law.
There is a problem here though because the referendum was illegal and regardless of how strongly you may feel about the quest for Catalonia independence, the Catalonia authorities broke the law to hold the referendum, in the same way that the police broke the law to uphold it.
A wise man once taught me ‘all problems exist in the absence of good conversation’.
The only way ever to circumvent differences in belief is to talk, not to act alone and certainly not to hit.
Blog post number: 1423