A year ago...
Jul. 7th, 2006 11:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
maleghasty...we all know what happened. It seems trite to say that I missed the Liverpool Street bomb by 30 minutes and roughly 100 feet, except that it isn't.
The day was filled with LJ and phonecalls and relief for me, and I imagine that statistically that was true for most people.
52 people were killed, and countless others (in that I can't find a firm number anywhere) were injured or suffered loss (or both), and I was glad on that day to be able to stand by the "Riverside" in Reading, listening to "End of the World News" by Tom McRae on my Shuffle, reflecting that I was lucky, no one that I knew was hurt - my life was untouched by the bombings.
I never knew the person that I think of today while she was still alive, and that is a mote of regret in itself. Miriam Hyman entered my consciousness by being the best friend of someone who was a colleague one year ago today. A few weeks after the bombings I ended up creating a temporary website (you can find the more permanent one here) to publicise the charitable foundation that Miriam's parents set up in her memory, and through doing that small thing I ended up reading what those who had known her wrote of her. It brought what had been a tense but in the end impersonal experience into very sharp relief for me and foremost amongst the ironies that confronted me was that here was a Jewish woman, killed my a muslim extremist, who had worked for years with charities that were attempting to re-form peaceful realtions and mutual respect between the Palestinian and Jewish / Israeli people. They blew up their allies and all it got them was infamy; I continue to be astounded that despite the almost complete and utter failure of terrorism to achieve its goals there are still people who think that their pursuit of it might make a difference.
Anyway, in truly British fashion I felt and still feel like an interloper, as though I have no right to feel sad about Miriam's death because I didn't know her and anyway shouldn't I feel sad about all of the deaths a year ago if I'm going to have an opinion about one of them? Is it like a small scale version of the outpouring of sorrow that I was so suspicious of when Diana died, that appears to other people, who don't feel it, to be false and somehow opportunistic? Well, regardless of how it may appear, or how conflicted it makes me feel I do feel sad about it, and I have no way to mitigate that today.
In a little while I'll spend a couple of minutes thinking about the whole experience and then I'll actually get on with some work. It's a vain hope I imagine, but it would be nice to hope that we never see another day like 07/07/2005 again. Ever.
The day was filled with LJ and phonecalls and relief for me, and I imagine that statistically that was true for most people.
52 people were killed, and countless others (in that I can't find a firm number anywhere) were injured or suffered loss (or both), and I was glad on that day to be able to stand by the "Riverside" in Reading, listening to "End of the World News" by Tom McRae on my Shuffle, reflecting that I was lucky, no one that I knew was hurt - my life was untouched by the bombings.
I never knew the person that I think of today while she was still alive, and that is a mote of regret in itself. Miriam Hyman entered my consciousness by being the best friend of someone who was a colleague one year ago today. A few weeks after the bombings I ended up creating a temporary website (you can find the more permanent one here) to publicise the charitable foundation that Miriam's parents set up in her memory, and through doing that small thing I ended up reading what those who had known her wrote of her. It brought what had been a tense but in the end impersonal experience into very sharp relief for me and foremost amongst the ironies that confronted me was that here was a Jewish woman, killed my a muslim extremist, who had worked for years with charities that were attempting to re-form peaceful realtions and mutual respect between the Palestinian and Jewish / Israeli people. They blew up their allies and all it got them was infamy; I continue to be astounded that despite the almost complete and utter failure of terrorism to achieve its goals there are still people who think that their pursuit of it might make a difference.
Anyway, in truly British fashion I felt and still feel like an interloper, as though I have no right to feel sad about Miriam's death because I didn't know her and anyway shouldn't I feel sad about all of the deaths a year ago if I'm going to have an opinion about one of them? Is it like a small scale version of the outpouring of sorrow that I was so suspicious of when Diana died, that appears to other people, who don't feel it, to be false and somehow opportunistic? Well, regardless of how it may appear, or how conflicted it makes me feel I do feel sad about it, and I have no way to mitigate that today.
In a little while I'll spend a couple of minutes thinking about the whole experience and then I'll actually get on with some work. It's a vain hope I imagine, but it would be nice to hope that we never see another day like 07/07/2005 again. Ever.
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no subject
Date: 2006-07-07 10:26 am (UTC)Amen.