Let's Make 7th July Last Year's News

I'm actually old enough to remember life before the one minute silence, let alone life before the two minute silence.
Yes, there was armistace day, when former servicemen assembled in Whitehall and remembered their wars, but that was as far as it went. And I can remember as a youngster, being told by my brother that there had been a time when the whole country, in factories, rail stations et al, would observe a minute's silence. But that had been a previous generation, our generation was the fortunate one; we would not be sacrificed in war and no one would have to mourn our wasted lives, collective grief could become a thing of the past.

Admittedly, there may have been an occasion at a football ground, when a respected servant of the club was honoured by a minute silence, although this was typically punctuated by the hooligans amongst the opposition support.

But then somebody realised that the cause of cheap nationalism could be forwarded by re-inventing the one minute silence, in the pretence that we needed to thank a previous generation for their efforts.

Please accept my sincerity when I state that I personally believe that we owe a massive debt to my parent's generation. I also believe, however, that gratitude should take the form of a decent pension, access to a comprehensive health service and a right to live securely, before we even consider any of the more token forms of gratitude.

I suspect, therefore, that it was the Tories, having set about destroying the quality of life for the elderly, who hit on the jingoist ruse of papering over the cracks by "honouring" the older generation in the highly symbolic—AND ENTIRELY FREE—one minute silence.
But once people had become inured to the practice, it wasn't considered enough to stand for one minute. Apparently that seemed disrespectful, so we got the TWO minute silence, because we all needed a little longing to show how much we care.
But it wasn't just for those war veterans anymore: no, ANYONE could qualify. We became a victim culture. Under touchy-feelie New Labour, we're all super-sensitive. To be human is to feel an other's pain. And it's not enough to feel it; it is necessary to SHOW it.

7th July 2005 was a horrible day. My own experience, however slight in comparison to those who genuinely experienced those events, was too close for comfort, and I found it deeply moving. I willingly took part in the silence that took place a week later, standing with thousands of others in the eerie calm besides Kings Cross, untroubled by the tourists who persisted of wheeling their suitcases through us, as though they were witnessing some eccentric lunch-time custom amongst the locals.

Yet here we are a year later, and we're having another go.

Radio 4's today programme was almost entirely dedicated to digging over the ashes of last year's tragedy. The newspapers reprinted last years photographs, and reinterviewed the victims. And once more we're asked to observe the silence.

Why? How much respect can we bear? Is victimhood something to revere?
Why don't we stick by the rhetoric AND CARRY ON IN DEFIANCE in the face of terrorism?

The more we show how much they hurt us, the greater the value of their actions, the greater their effectiveness at hitting at the society they detest. We should be countering this by actively moving on, putting our tragedies behind us.

Twentieth Century warfare was fought on a massive scale, particularly in terms of the Great War. "The Lost Generation" that perished in that conflict had a profound effect upon their contemporaries left behind to pick up the pieces. Hundreds of thousands were slaughtered, to the effect that every village, every factory, every railway station, had a member taken. The Somme alone claimed 20,000 souls in one day. It is no wonder, then, that the survivors left felt the need to grieve together; everybody had lost someone. It was genuinely a bid to stop it happening again.

Terrorism is wicked, and frightening in its random, pointless violence. It is not, however, anything near the social disaster that the Great War was. Neither are any of the other tragedy's of our age, however hurtful they feel.
In an age when it seemingly only takes one scouser to trip on the litter strewn streets of Merseyside to send the people of Liverpool into a grieving frenzy, (and the florists off to the Mercedes dealerships with their earnings), maybe it's time to ask WHY we need to do this. Are we really that sensitive? Or are we all a little bit too comfortable to feel good about ourselves anymore?

Let's toughen up a bit and take a leaf from our parent's generation; keep it to yourself. I'd rather bottle it up than bottle-it any day.