Terrorists - how does your country react?
July 11th, 2005
Over the weekend I received the following email from someone I know living in the US (kept anonymous as I know he wouldn’t want his name mentioned).
I think this perfectly sums up the different ways terrorism affects different cultures.
The aftermath of these terrorist attacks in London have highlighted some very important differences between English people and the Americans. First up, everyone I heard interviewed in the UK seemed rather underwhelmed by it all – as if global terrorism was just out to give them a tricky journey home from work. Most Americans by this point would be calling on for another country to be bombed into the stone-age. One guy said “we should just level Iraq”. He thought somehow this would make me feel better. He looked a bit confused when I asked “so, tell me how would that help then?”. The other thing is that the responses were very measured and reasonable. When interviewed on NPR radio one guy from the Home-Office when asked about tightening security on the tube began by saying “well, we have to be sensible about this”. It just made me smile.
This is really the difference I think, and why this terrorism lark just isn’t going to work on the UK. We’ve had ‘em for years, our emergency services are ready for them and the people of London just expect them. But still, something like this always jolts us, gets people flapping and causes lots of hype. This will soon die down, and already people are just getting back to work.
The day after the attack I picked up one of Charlies magazines, it had a story about the Asian Tsunami. Whilst scanning through it, one line immediately stood out.126,000 people died in the Aceh region…
126,000 in one region alone. That is just not a scale that we can deal with, 50~ (number of dead so far in London) being on a scale we can comprehend makes it all the more real. (I do not mean to detract from the pain inflicted on people who lost loved ones as a result of the attack or the tsunami)
Who do you think is more scared? The people with the threat of Islamic terrorism hanging over them, or the people who face the possibility of having their entire life, family, town or country wiped out in just a few moments of natural disaster. I’m willing to bet that people faced with devastating natural disasters are able to take simple precautions and then just get on with their lives. Perhaps it’s time people (and I’m not saying this happens a lot in the UK, but it does occasionally and mainly concerned with new laws that “may curtail some civil liberties”) stopped flapping their arms around and getting flustered. Daily we all face the prospect of catastrophic destruction, perhaps we’d have more fun if we just got on with things while we’re waiting.
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July 12th, 2005 at 09:09 PM
[...] David’s got an interesting entry on the US vs UK reactions to “terrorism” – I use inverted commas as the US definition of it is all encompassing …. [...]