London Bombings
Many thoughts on this. Little time.
My wife Lisa could have been right in the mix had she stayed to complete her PHD in London as planned. Her department offices at UCL were one block away from one of the sites. Her residence was close as well. She walked to school when she was there. The block on Woburn Place, where the bus was blown up, was on her route. When we were discussing her attending school there we spoke of the possibility of attacks. I distinctly remember saying “you can’t let terrorists win. You have to follow your dreams. The odds are very small.”
As a result I am angry at a large constellation of people/groups. I am angry with the perpetrators of this. The philosophy behind this type of act says that “only shocks to the system will work to change things. No one is innocent since we are all guilty of being willfully blind to the injustices we perperate by our very participation in a system of oppression”. No one is justified in being this certain about anything. There is no greater crime than mass murder in the service of belief or ideology. We’ve seen it all over the globe in recent decades. Egypt. Algeria. Vietnam. Munich Olympics. Northern Ireland. Yugoslavia. Rwanda. Darfur. New York. Madrid. Iraq. Now London. Sadly, not an exhaustive list.
Which leads me to the next group. I am mortified at the response of our so-called leaders to this growing threat. The dissimulation of the Bush regime will do nothing but breed this kind of terrorism. The utter and complete lack of honesty about why unknown tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians have been killed by occupation forces and insugents alike will scar the face of humanity for generations. In light of this, is it any wonder why we now are quick to achieve outrage toward the perpetrators and empathy for the victims of the London bombings, but just as easily accelerate to full rage at the machine that stokes the fire?
Finally, watching the looped images on CNN, FOX, MSNBC I fall to complete dismay at the possibility of moving from an “information society” to a “knowledge society.” The concentration of mass media and repackaging of news as entertainment and spectacle is one of the great failings of our generation of leadership. The unhooking of news broadcast licensing in the US in particular from any sort of criteria of journalism seems a desperately bad mistake.
A sad day all around.
