Honoring a minute of silence is just grieving with your neighbors and those that you identify with. If you don't identify, then there's no shame in not remaining silent. I can't speak for the international community, or it's level of grief-identification with the whole event, save that it's an enormous, very in-one's-face spectacle of violence, so the awareness level is acute.
I can't speak for any place but the US, and even being that broad is dangerously presumptuous of me, but I think the simple fact of the matter for those in the States is that the level of ironic distance from these deaths, and that particular violent, hateful, fearful act, is pretty drastically thin.
I was in New York that morning last year, and I had been in the towers the afternoon before. My first time in New York, so we were being a bit touristy, we have reams of photos of the place and us on the floor below the Observation Deck. (It had been raining that morning and did again in the afternoon, so the top Deck was closed).
After effectively watching the South Tower go down from our cab trying to get to JFK, not knowing it had been closed down, still not really grasping the ramifications of what had gone down, my life changed permanently. I have zero level of ironic distance from an event like that, and it still hurts running through that 24-hour period and the week in Queens and Manhattan afterward - walking past Missing Persons walls, spending time with crowds of terrified people in Washington Square, going to bars and seeing people just cuddling on couches to feel better for a moment, and everybody working together to take care of one another.
My point is that Americans had never had something like this happen to them, never really been so educated on a large scale of what a tragedy like this entails. It's very real and very scary, surely, and the ability to be objective about it, I think, is lessened dramatically for anyone who identifies strongly with this country, or even more so, with New York. I'm inclined to think that sorrow comes with understanding of any tragedy, and understanding comes through education. It's more than a fucking shame that Americans are typically very uneducated of tragedy elsewhere in the world, but as long as it remains unreal to the majority of people here, its not going to strike a deep or personal chord.
I think it’s unfortunately very easy to get hypocritical in that position, and to unconsciously value one’s own suffering over the suffering of others elsewhere in the world. Is it wrong to ignore or even unconsciously devalue human suffering on any scale simply because it isn't right in front of you? Absolutely. But I'd still be very quick to tell anybody not to devalue the grief of people who are stricken by this.
Bear in mind, I'm not speaking politically in any capacity, I'm just talking about people. The media's made the World Trade Center attacks a household name for people the world over, reduced to a number/buzzword to filter more easily into the mass consciousness. So no, Western grief isn't more important than any other, it's just louder and more obvious, with everything that entails.
Sorry for the rant… |
