In Memoriam
Timothy Garton Ash has a thoughtful post and accompanying comment thread in today’s Grauniad “Comment Is Free’ section that addresses the differences between US and British attitudes to the alleged ‘war on terror’, viewed in the light of the nation’s muted reaction to the anniversary of last year’s July 7 suicide bombings.
I can’t believe it’s almost July 7 again already. This time last year, the weather was equally hot and glorious and my younger son and I were in our new flat decorating the week before we were due to move in, sweating copiously amongst a chaos of plaster dust, floorboards and paint. There was no cable and no phone yet and hence no internet – though the bloody company had managed to turn it off at the other end already- and a huge local tunnel project was interfering with the radio reception, so all we could get was a horribly crackly Radio 5 live and occasional blurry, distant bits of the World Service.
So we’re sitting there doing the traditional builders’ thing on arriving at any project – having a nice sit down and a cup of tea – when the first reports of the suicide bombings on the Underground started trickling in. At first it was just an ‘incident’ at one station, then two, then three … no more work was done that day as we sat riveted, listening horrified as the enormity of what had happened unfolded. Somehow only getting brief audio glimpses of what was happening made it seem so much worse.
Now a year has gone by already. It seems incredible. I know the only real certainty is that time goes on but the swiftness of it still astonishes.
I’m old enough to remember some of the most shocking tragedies there’ve been in the UK – the Birmingham pub bombings, the attack on the cavalry in the Mall, the Canary wharf bombing, the assassination of Lord Mountbatten, the blowing up of a coach full of soldiers and their families on the motorway, and many others – and my childhood and adolescence is punctuated by these landmarks in time. But I was never scared. Why should I have been? It’s not as though I had been strafed running for the shelter, as my mother had been, or survived direct blitz bombing as most of both my parents’ families did. A few bombs here and there are nothing ( and I qualify that – obviously they weren’t nothing to the victims and their families) in comparison to the suffering caused by WWII or Beirut or any other war you care to name.
I mean really, what is there to be scared of? If someone takes it into their head to make a violent statement because of some idiotic religious or political belief there’s little any of us can do about it. If it happens it happens – there’s bugger- all we can do , so why be scared?
Most of our neighbours are Moslem and some Moslems are terrorists – should we be scared of them? Hell no, no more than I should be scared of my Catholic neighbours because the IRA was Catholic. To think that way leads to paranoia and stupidities like the Birmingham 6 trials and the recent raids in Forest Gate.
I admit I was scared for a while after the 7 July bombings – after all, we live right across from and regularly use a mainline station and metro system and you can’t help comparing, but you can’t live your life in fear of so nebulous a threat. The likelihood of bombings is no more now than it was in the seventies and eighties.
This is what makes American war hysteria so difficult to comprehend for the British. War? What war? We’ve seen war, and this isn’t it.
What happened this time last year was an horrendous crime. Because of the nature of it no-one has been brought to justice. But to the victims and their families it matters little whether it was an act of war or a crime. They still have to live with their pain and grief and anger. All we can wish them is that time will heal.
[NB: This is posted a day in advance as I intend to be away from the pc all day tomorrow]
