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Over on Public Address Tze Ming has queried the lack of posting, in the NZ pol 'sphere, about the Mumbai bombings. Russell Brown has responded for himself here.
For me, I'm aware that I haven't posted about Mumbai, I haven't posted about Israel and Lebanon and Gaza (I started to write something but it sucked), and there are doubtless many other things I didn't post about in the context of international relations and general Bad Things that happen.
My reason is simply that I find these things so bewilderingly horrible that I have little to write or say. The difference for me between Mumbai and the London bombings last year is that I could imagine myself on the Tube in London (and was there less than a month ago) and so there is the added horror of being able to fit myself into that picture, which prompts my fingers on the keyboard.
It isn't that I don't care. It's more that I don't know that I have anything to add but sympathy. Which seems so pathetically insufficient.
Update, 9.04am Wednesday 19th July 2006: Actually I just checked and I never wrote anything about the London bombings (at least not in July). Weird that I thought that I did!
1 comment:
You tend to blog a lot on your surroundings and what is familiar. England is familar, as lot of us whities are probably only 2nd or 3rd gen from England and care of the British TV being beamed in England feels a lot like 'home' and their deaths become more relevant.
I could tell you today that we've have 50 people either dead or missing due to floods here in Korea, which would be a major news story in NZ but most of NZ bloggers don't actually care about because it's happening in a place you have no reference to.
I don't blog a lot on Korea unless there has has been something in the local news. I go to other forums to discuss it because I know you guys just don't get what I'm talking about. I don't blame you, before I came here the only things I knew about Korea was that it held an olympic games back in the 80s and the Korean war via MASH.
But our situations are different.
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