This entry was posted on
Wednesday, January 5th, 2005 at
9:19 am and is filed
under Humanity.
OK, so let me just make this clear…
Victims of World War I and other wars (some lovely statistics available here) get one or two minutes. Every year.
Victims of the September 11th atrocities got two minutes, but only for one year. (Though, granted, we also managed to silence a few telemarketers.)
Victims of the Asian Tsunami (the Tsunami With No Name) get three minutes… not counting the extra one or two minutes given in many areas on New Years Eve that mostly allowed us to piss away a few million on gunpowder and not feel too bad about it.
Victims of the Totally Justified Iraq War get… no minutes. Not even a minute minute. Perhaps this is because Jack Straw has yet to crunch the numbers and calculate how many minutes (or perhaps even seconds) all those dead Iraqi civilians should be allocated.
UPDATE – We interrupt this silence for a timely sermon from Tom DeLay. More here.
By Chicken Yoghurt January 5, 2005 - 3:28 pm
I don’t know about anybody else but for me being emotionally blackmailed into observing a functionally useless three-minute silence harks back to the collective hysteria over the death of Diana. It’s like some New Labour inversion of the Two Minute Hate.I wonder how much GDP the UK generates on average in three minutes? A significant contribution to, say, a disaster relief fund, I’d wager. Much more useful than making the nation stand around idly helping nobody except caught-on-the-hop pols who need to be seen to be doing something/anything.