Stories

[jere7my]

I don't want to sound callous, but I don't think there's any way to bring this up without sounding callous, so:

The deaths in London are a tragedy, make no mistake. But the weekly death toll in Iraq from terrorist bombings is more or less equivalent. The disparity between our reactions to the two surprises and confuses me. The Iraqis who die have stories, too.

Comments

[uncleamos]

Exactly. How about the people US Forces take out? Stories there too.

[irilyth]

It's news because it's new; the weekly death toll in Iraq isn't new any more. :^(

Even aside from the newness, the relative rate does make a difference, especially against Iraq's extremely violent past under Hussein. If you graph out violent deaths per week in Iraq, I bet the current rate is low historically speaking, whereas yesterday's spike in London is a pretty significant spike.

And, it may also be plain and simple racism or nationalism for a lot of people. We react more strongly to people who look, walk, and talk more like us than to people with an alien culture, religion, language, and appearance.

[eclectic-boy.livejournal.com]

As soon as London bombs start going off with the frequency of Baghdad bombs, you'll see a lessening of the disparity. For example, at the height of the IRA bombings in Northern Ireland, or of the Intifada bombings in Israel, a new bomb might be a lead story on American news, but not much more.
This got a huge amount of attention because it happened in a place 'everyone thought was safe'. (Quotes because that's a simplification in so many ways....)

[gannet.livejournal.com]

Once I'd got over the initial shock, I had the same thought. I wondered why the strength of the reaction--and yes, I think irilyth and eclectic_boy are correct about the reasons. But I think there's a further aspect for me (and possibly others of us): I don't know anybody in Iraq personally (not even any US soldiers, contractors, or aid workers), whereas I currently have friends in London, and have a variety of friends and family who have spent substantial chunks of their lives in London. So I immediately started to worry about people I knew. I had to go through a mental checklist (A's been back in the US for a couple of years, cousin L has been back for a year, P has posted already (and so on). Hm... better email O and see how she is.) It wasn't until I stopped worrying about individuals that I thought about Iraq.

[flammifera.livejournal.com]

whereas I currently have friends in London, and have a variety of friends and family who have spent substantial chunks of their lives in London.

I don't want to sound callous either, but I was initially surprised at how shocked everyone was at what sounded like a low death toll. But then a) a friend reminded me of the large number of casualties in total and b) I keep being sobered by the remembrance that I've *been* through at least 3 of those tube stations...and if it'd been a week later, I very well might've been in King's Cross making my way through London after flying back from Spain. It's partly the shock to me that something happened in England, a place however simplistically I would've thought was relatively safe, combined with those personal ties.

[arctangent.livejournal.com]

People aren't all that shocked by death, frankly. They're shocked by new, unexpected and interesting deaths, and then only as a subset of being shocked by new, unexpected and interesting things in general. I don't even think most people are interested in the "stories" of the people who did die in the Tube bombings; they're just interested in the fact that the Tube got bombed and no one expected it to.

Think about how much attention was paid to the death of *one person* (or, depending on how you count, two people) with the Scott and Laci Peterson thing, or with the deaths of three people with the Brian Nichols thing, or any other big story about some high-profile murder or whatnot. If the media counted these things on the basis of total number of deaths, the Columbine shootings would easily have been pushed aside by any number of inner-city gang-violence stories from the same year. And so on.