Two minutes' silence ?!
I think this is a gross (and, from many points of view, grotesque)
overreaction. Many people are killed for all sorts of reasons and we
don't do really anything about it let alone have an official `stop
everything' mark of respect.
I would like not to participate, but it is unclear to me how I can do
this without causing either too much practical disruption, or showing
undue disrespect. Should I walk out of the lecture theatre before
the silence starts and return afterwards ?
I would not normally have this kind of political discussion on a list
like this one, but since the event organisers have decided to carry
out a political act - the two minutes' silence - which I disagree
with, I feel I should speak.
You might argue, I suppose, that this event is unique because it
involves (i) a single (ii) recent event killing (iii) around 100
(iv) european (v) civilians (vi) deliberately. But that seems to me
to be cherry-picking the criteria - you need most of those to
eliminate other events like road deaths, plane and train crashes,
invasions, other bombings, etc. We might just as easily care about a
single cause, or also about historical events, or put a threshold at a
higher number, or care about people at large or just Debian
developers, or only care about children, or only about people `we' had
killed (for some value of `we'), or what have you.
I think it's part of the whole syndrome of not having a grip. As I
wrote in another place, in response to posturing by politicians like
Bush and Blair telling us that our Resolve is to be admired and we
have to have Resolve:
What our polity needs is not Resolve. What we need is to Get a Grip.
What we need is for politicians and the media to go back to playing
the game the way they did before we were told Nothing Will Ever Be The
Same.
(The Resolve is of course the Resolve to continue doing massively
stupid, illegal and immoral things like invading Iraq. The Resolve to
press ahead with wrongheadedness. The Resolve to make even more
people so massively (and justifiably) upset with us that their loony
fringe is motivated to come and die at us just so they can take a few
of us with them. The Resolve to Follow the Glorious Leaders Into
Hideous Error.)
Ian.
(who tried to go to London that day but was too late to either get to
my meeting or be blown up.)
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