by Lynne Barnes
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A hospital patient who managed to talk a man out of detonating a bomb in a maternity wing said the would-be attacker “asked for a cuddle” before standing down. Nathan Newby, who stopped an atrocity through an act of kindness, spoke publicly for the first time about his encounter with Mohammad Farooq before receiving the George Medal [from King Charles, above] for bravery. Farooq, a clinical support worker who took a viable pressure cooker bomb into St James’s hospital in Leeds intending to “kill as many nurses as possible” was jailed for at least 37 years last year. After asking for a cuddle, Farooq told Newby to “phone the police before I change my mind.’ —The Guardian, March 24, 2026 Oh, the layers of life right now— sweet family visit with my thirty-something god-nephew and our goddess-niece, his wife. Calming, evocation of belonging, togetherness, as we commune deeply with them. They are artists, teachers, such loving creatures, here with their stray-rescued-as-a-puppy-ten-years-ago, Navajo, to spend the night with us. Bearing down on that layer is a dangerous one above it, malignant, narcissistic, Machiavellian, sadistic, hanging by a thread— a heavy concrete cloud, just above our heads, visible, threatening, seeded with stress and dread. I fly above into the stratosphere of compassion, look down through the conflicting, complex layers of our human race in this era. Kindness, not war and hate, rescues minds from harmful ideas. Will we learn to weave empathic ropes to throw, not just to those we love, but to those who other us as well? Can humanity, we, reel away from our constant collapse into competing cultiness, a tendency in all of us? Broader belonging, expansive, Transcendent Human Tribe is now our mental moon shot challenge. How will it come? I wonder as I land back on earth from my imaginary skyward travel. Perhaps Eroding Othering should be a sibling category to the Nobel Prize for Peace. All this I think as anxious rescue Navajo finally stops pacing, settles out of her traumatic memories of her early life on the reservation, on the streets— packless, othered, bitten, diseased. At last, she welcomes our acceptance, lets us pet her, relaxes on her fluffy, gray, perfect circle of bed. Lynne Barnes' poetry memoir Falling into Flowers won the 2017 Goodreads Rainbow Award for Best Gay and Lesbian Poetry, was a finalist for the 2018 Eric Hoffer Book Awards, and received Honorable Mention in both the Gay and Poetry categories for the 2018 San Francisco Book Festival Awards. |