Back on the tube this morning for the first time since the bomb blasts. I read a book and tried to drown out fellow passengers discussing how they were “nearly” caught in the blast at Liverpool Street or wherever. I could probably make a case for myself about how I “might” have been on the Piccadilly Line train that had a bomb on board. But trains run every three minutes, so the likelihood is slight. I could quite as easily have ended up in a train crash like that at Hatfield, or a plane crash. I could also be rammed into the central reservation on the motorway. It could happen, but probably won’t. Taking some sensible precautions and keeping an eye out for suspect packages is about all I can do.
Nonetheless, I saw at least one person on a tube platform this morning in tears, but that could have been for anything. And the train I travelled in on was a lot busier than usual, but that was because many displaced Piccadilly Line passengers were using the service.
As another aside, I watched a bit of the Moto GP from California late on BBC2 last night. They too had a minute’s silence before the start of the race, and it was much better observed than the F1 GP drivers had been earlier in the day. Mind you, the tannoy announcer at the track talked through the whole thing. Oh well, there’s no need to get competitive over these things.
I do think that the preponderance of minutes of silence is really a product of a more secular society. In the past, we’d have all grieved for the dead when we went to church/mosque/temple/synagogue that week and said our prayers. The percentage of the population that visit a place of worship has fallen, and so we find solace in taking part in minutes of silence, not in prayer but remembrance.
There does seem to be some kind of unwritten set of rules about how many minutes silence we observe depending on the incident. This week Europe is to observe two minutes’ silence to mourn the dead and injured.
Back in January, we observed a three minute silence for the, perhaps, 250,000 dead from the Indian Ocean tsunami.
Remembrance Day, November 11, gets a two-minute silence in the UK as we remember the dead from our wars.
All of these are gestures. There’s nothing wrong with a gesture of course. Many appreciate them. But I still wonder about “the rules” for what deserves such a gesture and what doesn’t. The tsunami was an unavoidable “act of god”. Of course communications could have been improved and many fewer might have died as a consequence, but tragedy would still have struck sadly. WWII was completely avoidable, in the sense that it was a man made event. Similarly, the bombings last week were the making of one man or a group of men (or women).
Yet as Will Smith so memorably explained to us a week or so ago during Live 8, something like 32,000 children die in Africa every day – one every three seconds. Should we observe a silence for them?
They’ve taken it down now, but earlier today, the UK Google page was sporting some kind of black ribbon (a bit like the AIDs ribbon) remembering the victims of the bombings. I’m really very uncertain about this. I don’t think we need it. We didn’t get a ribbon for the victims of the Omagh bombing where 29 died.
And Gia got sent a very strange graphic which, as she says, is completely unnecessary.
Earlier today, someone suggested to me that we should have some kind of wristband that effectively said “Fuck You” to terrorists. But where does that fit in with our other armfulls of wristbands? Just going about our daily business is surely enough to say that we don’t care and we’re not scared.
And please, no charity singles! If you want to give money to charity, then go simply make a donation. Don’t give your back catalogue a boost by jumping on the bandwagon. There’s no need to talk about your donation either.