I am as upset as anyone over the Pike River disaster and feel very sorry for the friends and families of the victims. Significant loss of life is always worth noting and deserving of exceptional mourning and acknowledgement by everyone. But, in the last fortnight how many other families have lost loved ones through illness, accident and crime? They have all experienced the intense shock of losing a friend, lover, family member or close associate. Do they or should they feel any different from the families of the Pike River victims? No. The sense of loss, outrage, pain and sorrow is the same. What we are seeing now and have been seeing over the last two weeks has been a media circus that, in this country, hasn't been seen since that Diana fiasco of the '90's. We have seen and are seeing public outpourings of grief that have less to do with real sympathy and more to do with the 'need' to be connected. I saw, on a web-news feedback, a comment from a 'Diana'-like sympathiser the comment "They gave their lives so that we all could live" What? This I'm sure was not a deliberate ironic statement, it was a bubbling up of emotion that had been whipped up by the media frenzy.
Seriously, RIP those miners and, believe me, I can empathise and sympathise with their grief. But, enough already. And, who the hell dreamed up the yellow ribbon crap?
2 comments:
Well the pink ribbon is taken up by breast cancer, the red by AIDS, the white by domestic violence and the green hardly seems appropriate- they were mining coal after all.
But I certainly get your point- the NZ media has a special talent for squeezing a suffocating stories to their slow death.
Thank goodness for a breath of sanity. As an immigrnat, I was feeling guilty for not getting emotionaly involved. My thought was "Poor bugger, not a nice way to go" and that was it.
The media are in a feeding frenzy, and it's not nice.
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