There will undoubtedly be a stream of Facebook statuses and
tweets about the Malaysian Airlines plane that was shot down overnight in
Ukraine. These will be updates and news articles, alongside messages offering
hopes and prayers, sympathy and tears, perhaps anger and retribution. Social
media will grieve. It’s a process I am usually averse to, finding that it
cheapens the ‘real’ grief of those who are the subject of the largely anonymous
voices of the Internet crying out as one.
Yet, I find
myself sitting here, reading through the news coverage of flight MH17 facing a
nearly unbearable sadness. And I don’t feel any need to hold that back.
Such an utterly senseless loss of
life.
298 people, three of whom were
infants, one a premier figure in AIDS research, the rest someone’s daughter,
son, sister, brother, mother, father, lover … people who boarded a plane never
thinking that they would not arrive at their destination, innocent of any
involvement in the Crimea, never believing they would be blown out of the sky, now lying scattered among charred wreckage somewhere in Ukraine. Never to come home.
The world is subject daily to
tragedy: lost homes, lives, futures. It is the startlingly simple antithesis to
the grace of our existence; something we, as humans, must face. And sometimes
when something like MH17 happens, I fear we cheapen the impact of these
tragedies, forgetting in the force of the news cycle’s main event that all over
the Earth people are suffering needlessly. I worry that in the rising crescendo
of social media we can conveniently forget these other happenings to latch onto
what is more immediate in our modern short-term consciousness.
What a cynic am I.
For as I write this, knowing full
well that I am adding my own voice to the growing pool—soon a flood—of voices
that are in essence only trying to make sense of things, I realize that this is
just the age we live in; that there is nothing cheap or disingenuous about
trying to make your feelings heard when we are provided, have even created, the platform to do so.
We all have our digital soapboxes and if we want to climb atop them to cry to
the heavens that are the endless reaches of the Internet then why should we not? Who is
anyone, and who am I, to belittle anyone’s expression of grief, hope, fear as
anything less than honest? As anything less than genuine?
And in releasing our feelings
about MH17 online, I wonder whether rather than pushing other tragedies to the
periphery of thought, we are in fact putting these into a kind of
relief. Reminding ourselves how fallible living actually is. For our shock is
the realization that the randomness of the event means that it could have been
you, me, a loved one. There is no telling when or how a life will end. When we
express our horror and our sympathy, we express, in a sense, our joy of
life beside the guttural, deep sadness that anyone can have theirs cut
short, irrespective of the tragedy and the way in which we wish to tell our
world.
Our focus may fall here on MH17
and the almost nameless sensation that accompanies the idea that a passenger
plane can just be shot from the sky for no reason other than the perfect awfulness
of the circumstance, but really it is more than that. We don’t forget about the
rest of the world—Africa, Gaza, refugees, so on and on and on—and we don’t rob
people directly related to the incident of their grief, presuming to adopt some
of their pain. What we do is lend ourselves to the social collective that is humanity, reminding ourselves of how
we belong to something greater than our own selfish beings, how we are all
suspect to machinations very much outside our control. It is these things that
we all have in common, which any expression of grief implicitly acknowledges.
For this reason, I will mourn and
feel immense sadness that so many people can have their lives cut short;
remembering also, that it is an unfortunate part of the human condition, all
over the world.
My thoughts and hopes with those lost aboard MH17.
