All quiet on the Western front
Why is it that whenever a "disaster" happens we have to stop for 2 to 3 minutes to pay "respect"? Today got me thinking about this with the 7/7/2005 train bombings. I work in a "super" market and was pushing a noisy cage not realising the rest of the shop had gone quiet, when I walked past a manager who promptly starred at me with his finger to his lips. That got me thinking, why am I standing here? Why should people blown up on a train be any different from the thousands of other people blown up that day? If it's right to be silent for every war and bombing anniversery no-one would ever talk.
Maybe because those people did not choose to die? But who chooses to die except those who don't care to live anyway or risk takers who accept the consequences of thier actions?
My question is this, do we stay silent because we want to, or because we are told to? If the former then I would like a reason for our social silence. If the latter then surely this raises more serious questions about external authority and our willingness to comply with it.
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A Further Question
At the time of the silence today I had just come out of the gym and was getting ready to go into the sauna. There were a couple of other blokes in their, ex miners. We observed the silence, but after it was finished we had a bit of a discussion.
I said I had no problem showing respect to people that had died. However, I couldn't remember there being two minutes silence on the anniversays of the people killed in the Birmingham pub bombins, or the Harrods bombing, or any of the other IRA bombings. I also wondered why it was that during all that time of regular terrorist attacks, the kind of paranoia and limitations of freedom that Blair has been pushing through never happened. After all its now 5 years since 9/11, and although the Tube bombings were appalling those repsonsible appear to have been just some loose cannons rather than any organised Al Qaeda cell.
The BBC ran a series a while ago about how fear is being used. They showed that most of the Emergency preparations etc. are a waste of time, that the CIA had investigated using some of these so called techniques such as a dirty bomb releasing radiation, or anthrax bombs etc., and found that they didn't work.
Arthur Bough
There's got to be a better
There's got to be a better reason other than us being hypercrits, I think we have to look more at when these silences occur (Exc. 11/11) in context to the political background and social movements since these silences arise from both.
Silence in the library
I was in the British Library reading room when the 2 minutes silence was observed. Thats a bit surreal, isn't it?
Emm,
that was convineint!