THE CONCRETE CALENDAR
Look at this image. It's from City Hall Square last Saturday. Or Pride Square, as it seems to be renamed this week. With rainbow lights up the facades and Tivoli's portal in the background - and up front, between the celebration and the street, the yellow blocks from Dansk Vejsikring A/S.
Rented equipment. There are companies now that live off this, driving protection out to our joy and picking it up again afterwards, and business is good - because it has a season all year round.
Let us try to follow it. Just one year, seen through the concrete. And see what we find.
In December the blocks stand around the Christmas markets, wrapped like gifts or painted like Christmas decorations, so the children don't have to ask. On New Year's Eve they move in around the large squares in Europe's capitals together with steel fencing and entrance control. At carnival time the processions run behind lorry barriers. At Easter there are soldiers standing in front of the churches in France, while bells ring for mass. A practice that is spreading. In summer the concrete is driven out to the city festivals and festivals, to concerts and open squares, and in August it stands here, in front of the rainbow flags at City Hall Square. On national days it protects the fireworks. And beneath it all, without season and without end date, stands the still, permanent layer that no one notices anymore - at the end of pedestrian streets, the police in front of the synagogues and Jewish schools, year after year, for so long that the children inside have never known anything else. That is, other than they understand that they must hide their identity as Jews.
Notice what kind of calendar this is.
It is the church year. It is the civil year. It is the music, the dancing, the celebration, the happy, free life in the open space.
Everything we gather around, when we are most ourselves, has gotten its own shadow of concrete, and the shadow follows us from celebration to celebration with a precision no festival committee could have planned better.
And we have become so accustomed to it that we paint the blocks and plant flowers in them, as if they came by themselves, as if they were a weather phenomenon.
But heavy concrete does not fall from the sky. Someone has assessed that it should stand there. Someone has calculated what needs to be protected in this country, and when, and the result of that calculation now stands deployed through our entire year like a liturgy in reverse.
You can read a people's faith in its festival calendar.
You can read something else in where it places its concrete.
So let's look at what it stands in front of.
THE LIST
Because it is not random crowds of people that are being protected. Try writing it down, place by place, as a list. The Christmas markets, meaning a Christian celebration. The churches at Easter, meaning the Christian faith itself. The synagogues and Jewish schools, meaning Jewish life. The concerts, meaning music. The city festivals and New Year's squares, meaning alcohol, dancing and men and women among each other in open space. Pride, meaning homosexuality. The national days, meaning the flag and the fatherland. And behind it all, oldest of them all, the cartoonists and satirists, who have lived under protection for so long that several have forgotten, many have not experienced, that it began with drawings in a Danish newspaper.
Read the list again. Slowly.
Christian celebration. Jewish life. Music. Dance. Alcohol. Homosexuality. Satire. Fatherland.
That list was not written in Europe. No Danish threat assessment invented it, no police force wished for it. It exists already, finished and old, in a particular teaching about the world, where each point on it has a name and a judgment - unbelief, idolatry, the forbidden, the impure, blasphemy.
Our authorities have not written the list. They have read it, taken it seriously, and answered it with concrete, point by point, as if it were an order form.
And I want to be precise here, because the conversation requires precision so patterns are separated. Europe has known terror before, and each terror has revealed its teaching through its targets.
When left-wing terror raged in the seventies and eighties, it went after power - RAF murdered the employers' association chairman, the Red Brigades a former prime minister, and the protection followed accordingly, bodyguards and armoured cars for a narrow circle at the top, while the square stood free.
Right-wing extremist terror also exists today, Breivik exists - although I personally would wish they had taken his life - Hanau exists, and each of them is a crime against everything we are in the Western world - and there, where it threatens, protection must be provided.
But none of them have placed concrete around our celebrations. The infrastructure around the Christmas market, the concert and the parade is built according to a third pattern, and that pattern does not go after the system and not after a minority. It goes after the very way we live. Even there, where the exception should stand strongest, in front of the rainbow flags, the deadliest attack in the West carried a declaration of loyalty to the Islamic State.
That is what is so telling about the list. It does not condemn us as power or as a state. It condemns us as life. It is not our armies that stand behind concrete. It is our freedom and our joy.
You know a Person by what they love.
You know a teaching by what needs to be protected against it.
THE BLOCK
And let me then address the concrete block itself. Just it. Because objects can also speak, if you look at them long enough.
A concrete block does not stop a bomb. It does not stop a bullet, not a knife or machete, not a man on foot, and anyone can walk around it, which we all do, every day, with too expensive coffee in hand. It is shaped against one single thing - a vehicle, used as a weapon, driven into a crowd of people at speed.
That tactic did not arise by itself. It was preached, verbatim and publicly, by the Islamic State's spokesman in 2014, who urged his listeners in the West to drive down the unbelievers with their cars, if they had no other weapons. And then it was carried out. Nice, where the lorry drove into the fireworks crowd on the 14th of July. Berlin, into the Christmas market. Stockholm, down the pedestrian street. London, across the bridges. Each time the cities answered with concrete, and the concrete got precisely the form that answers precisely that sermon.
That is what stands in our squares. Not a general defence against a general evil, but a PRECISE answer to a PRECISE call. The block's geometry is a quotation. You can read the sermon in its profile, as you can read the projectile in armour.
And then there is the other layer, the one that is not rented and not yellow.
In Copenhagen there stood a man in front of the synagogue on Krystalgade one February night in 2015, while a bar mitzvah was being celebrated inside. His name was Dan Uzan, he was a volunteer guard, and he was shot and killed at his post by a perpetrator who the same night had attacked a debate meeting about freedom of expression. Since then armed police have stood at Jewish buildings in this country without pause, and the remarkable thing is not that the protection came. The remarkable thing is that no one has ever suggested removing it again. Everyone knows why. No one says why. A tacit agreement has arisen in Europe, where the concrete and the police are allowed to know what the speakers and editorials must not.
That is the actual division of labour in our public sphere now.
Language has been given the task of reassuring, soothing if not directly anaesthetising, and the equipment has been given the task of protecting - and the two no longer speak together. You can stand in City Hall Square and hear one thing and see the other at the same time. Or you can walk the five minutes to Christiansborg, where the securing of democracy's house itself is shaped as art, granite and bronze in beautiful round forms, so we can pass it every day and pretend it is decoration.
We have not just become accustomed to the protection. We have given it costume, so we can be free from seeing what it is an answer to.
A civilisation that does not dare say what it knows does not stop knowing it. It casts it in concrete and places it in the square.
Is this what we want?
Is this who we want to be?
Is this how it should be?
And if so - for how long?
❤️🔥🪽
This got a bit long. I know that. But there is no way to write something so serious, briefly. And you are an adult. You can just stop reading.
I hope regardless you got hold of it.
Happy Tuesday evening. ☀️
