I was watching the news yesterday morning in the aftermath of the appalling events at Domodedovo airport and the news channel I was viewing had the CCTV images of the moment that the bomb went off, and, unlike the big, dramatic, slo-mo excesses enhanced by the CGI effects departments of the biggest Hollywood blockbusters, this devastating moment managed to look somehow utterly insignificant and understated, as all the camera shows is just the littlest of yellow flashes.
To the generations who have experienced those kinds of movies it looks like not very much at all, just a tiny flash of yellow lasting barely a second on a busy afternoon.
And yet…
After that little flash of yellow, 35 real human beings lie dead or dying.
After that little flash of yellow, another hundred and more living, breathing people like you and me sustain horrific injuries that will change their lives forever if they survive them at all.
After that little flash of yellow, ball bearings and shrapnel flew out on all directions and tore into the flesh and bone of any person that got in its way.
That’s real life for you.
Barely a moment, but 35 lie dead.
Such a tiny moment in time but hundreds of lives will never be the same again.
Just one tiny flash of yellow.
I know that some of you visit Lesser Blogfordshire to get away from the unpleasantness of the daily news, but over the last 24 hours this has been much on my mind. Philosophically, I know that the purpose of terrorism is to terrorise, and that if I let them terrorise me then the battle is lost, but, every day I still feel the slight wobble of uncertainty as I see the beloved depart to head about her day that someone, somewhere might just take it upon themselves to reshape our lives forever, and I’m sure she finds that similar dark thoughts nag at the corners of her mind every time I head out of the door.
By an unhappy coincidence, yesterday was one of the few days of the year upon which I have to poke my little nose out of the boundaries of Lesser Blogfordshire and spend the day in the bright lights of the big city, and so it just happened to be one of those very rare days on which I spend time in public places like railway terminals and tube trains, and so I was probably more aware than usual of how crowded these places are and how random these kinds of attacks can be.
Look around you in any public place and all you will see are ordinary people like you and me just getting on with their lives. Just doing the shopping, or travelling to a meeting or having a day out, with no expectations that anything today is going to make those activities any different to the hundreds of times they’ve done them before. But these are the same types of ordinary people who always suffer the horrific consequences during and after these kinds of terrible, terrible events.
Ordinary people like you and me, with plans and hopes and dreams and commitments and stuff to do, all just trying to get on with their lives and do them. This is why there was more than a little nervousness in my soul as I lurked in those various places yesterday, not because of any “terror” as such – I’m sure we all bulldoze our way through life pretty much assuming that these things won’t actually happen around us – but because of the purely random and arbitrary way that these things happen when they do.
I can’t help but empathise with those ordinary travellers because I’m quite often an ordinary traveller too. Sometimes it’s a lot easier to walk in another person’s shoes than others, and although I can’t possibly really understand what each and every one of those people and their families went through and are still going through as I sit here safely typing my thoughts today, I can at least send some of my sympathies in their direction during these terrible, terrible days.
Meanwhile, to the rest of us who are still able to get on with our lives, have a safe day, people.
Please.
Yes Martin. Real life can get very bad, very quickly. Your post says it very well.
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