I’d prefer not to write about world events and politics. There’s the most fantabulous amount of snarking, bitching, whining, ranting, begging, rightousness and spleen already packaged for your delectation at Daily Kos, Eurotrib, and associates (see their blogrolls. My knuckles hurt just thinking about typing them all out). Need I join in? Didn’t think so. Anyway, I’m not sure I drink quite enough coffee to keep up with the big boys.
Sometimes, though, something happens that a) makes me very cross indeed and b) is vaguely relevant to this my purpose in life – language, that flower of evolution, creation and creator of intelligence, signifier of the self-aware mind. And given a pearl of great price, this ability to conjour up realities within another brain, and alter another being’s thoughts, this is what some people do with it:
On Tuesday, 11th of July, seven bombs exploded on packed commuter trains in Mumbai. This morning, I heard someone call this disaster ‘even comparable to the July 7th bombings in London.’
Can any of you think what this man might have meant? He can’t have been referring to the death toll – we lost 52, Mumbai has lost at least 200 and counting. I could charitably assume that he meant that both London and Mumbai have been bombed by terrorists before. The IRA killed less than 100 Londoners over 20-odd years of bombing. Mumbai has lost over 300 to Islamic militants since 1993. Is this ‘comparable’? And this is my point. There are some of us, here in Britain, who cannot conceive of any tragedy greater than our own tragedies, any losses more devastating than our loss. An attempt to describe another’s devastation will be restricted to its relation to us, ours, here. How it affects us, compares to ours, mindlessly accepting the (horribly, not-uncommon) British bias in which one of ‘us’ is worth four of ‘them’. Only because we have language, we can relive our own sorrows, while a thousand miles away a vaster sorrow is compressed into ‘even comparable’. And so we diminish others’ suffering, so as not to take the edge off ours.
