The two minute silence was scrupulously observed here at work, with most people heeding Ken Livingstone’s wish for Londoner’s to go out in the street. I stayed in the office, but looking out the window showed I was in the minority.
I won’t repeat what I said the other day about minutes of silence. And it’s right that we remember the dead. But I still find myself troubled with what gets “remembered” and what doesn’t. In this instance, the silence was observed across Europe.
Atrocities are happening all the time, and you hear about tragedies such as the 24 children who died in a suicide attack in Bagdhad yesterday. The children were all aged between 10 and 13 according to the report. A US soldier also died, more children are in hositpial, and it seems that the attack might have happened when troops were handing out sweets to the kids. Oh, and there’s already been another suicide attack in Bagdhad today. Should we not remember these poor victims too?
When it was being developed, Drop The Dead Donkey, the comedy series set in a newsroom, was provisionally titled Dead Belgians Don’t Count/. The reason was the unspoken newsworthiness pecking order of the dead from different nations.
I’m making this up, and I apologise in advance if anyone is upset by this, but it goes something like this:
1 Brit = 4 Americans = 8 Australians = 10 French = 13 Spanish = 20 Israelis = 30 Iraqis = 100 Pakistanis = 500 Rwandans = 1000 Chinese
What I mean is that the column inches afforded to the deaths of this many people are essentially equal when it comes to coverage of tragedies involving people of those nationalities.
Have a look on the BBC News site today for these stories from the last 24 hours:
76 Kenyans killed in massacre
Bulgarian child killed in gangland bomb attack
Pakistan train crash kills 132
Motorcyclist dies in Lancashire traffic accident
(All found by searching for the word “killed”
Of course not all these stories are given the same prominance on the BBC’s website, but I think it highlights what I’m trying to say.
That categorically doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t remember the London dead. But maybe we need to think just a little beyond our own locale. If you lost a loved one in the blasts last week, it won’t be of any solace to you, but around the worlds far greater tragedies are happening almost daily.