The two bombs at the Boston marathon were despicable, a healthy happy event marred by a twisted mind that should be rightly condemned and punished. My guess is it’s someone with a grudge against his high school PE teacher rather than international terrorists; the bombs barely touched the nearby buildings. I remember I was ill when Baghdad was attacked, I watched the shock and awe from my bed, the night sky incessantly fireworked in red for hours. I’m juxtaposing these two with regard to the news coverage and how we feel about the dead and injured. For hours the news has shown the same clips of a runner falling, people being evacuated in wheelchairs and Obama’s moral pronouncements of such a thing happening on peaceful American soil. Similarly hours of live video followed the Baghdad skyline through the night. Not puffs of smoke from backpack bombs but the shuddering violence of high tech incendiaries a thousand times more damaging: And not two but countless. God only know what was happening on the ground that night. I think I can safely presume thousands were killed, tens of thousands injured and a million traumatised but personally I didn’t feel the dreadful emotion that should accompany that mass decimation of human kind. I saw it from afar as if it were the buildings being punished. In Boston they were people, the little boy who died was like a neighbour’s child. From the tenor and closeness of the coverage I did feel the emotion. Should there be a connect and disconnect in these two instances? Do not they bleed as we do? Haven’t they the right to feel a thousand times more resentment than we feel? Should we be surprised if they do?
No comments:
Post a Comment