"...we're better than you. Everyone is better than you. Our city works. We rather like it. And we're going to go about our lives. We're going to take care of the lives you ruined. And then we're going to work. And we're going down the pub."
- from 'A Letter To The Terrorists, From London' on The London News Review
What is the appropriate response when your city has been bombed by terrorists? Londoners by and large have decided that the answer is this: write our blogs, do our shopping, have our meetings, carry on with our lives.
And in the moments after the truth about the bombs settled over us, when London buzzed with a quiet anger (an indignant anger, not the hatred or fear the terrorists hoped to spark), that felt right. Getting on with life would defy the terrorists in a way they hadn't expected. Merely getting on the Tube, as we do every day, would be an act of defiance, one we would proudly undertake.
But is that enough?
Cut to the still and pitch-black scene under Russell Square, where scattered bodies lie unclaimed, out of reach in a temporary, fragile tomb while we go about our business above them, ignoring the now-dead just as we may have done the day before when they anonymously crossed our paths. I keep coming back to this scene. It haunts me, and I can't help seeing echoes of the helpless dead below in the do-nothing-differentness we've embraced above.
Where are the neighborly acts and vigils and public demonstrations that so readily put terror in its place in New York and Madrid? You could put this down to the British upper lip if not for the fact that London is no more British than New York is American. And besides, the Oprah-style wailing after Diana's crash cancelled that myth.
I think we're still in shock. The tragedy isn't real to us because we haven't really seen it. There were no images of falling towers or rows of black body bags on which to focus our grief. For most of us, 7/7 was more about relief than grief. A flurry of text messages, emails, Are-you-safe?s and I'm-oks.
Is a two-minute silence, a week after the fact, the best that we can do as a city to 'care for the lives they ruined'? How many among us would DO SOMETHING if only we were asked? Would you download a segment of cctv footage and help the police in their hopeless task?
But our leaders won't instigate a mass response. It's in their interests, after all, to keep us on our daily commutes. If there is any consolation on the political side, it's that Tony Blair has been speaking of police actions rather than trigger-happy military ones.
If anything, Blair seems too eloquent, too profoundly hurt by the bombings, and there are no signs that he will inherit the swell of popular support George W. or Rudy Giuliani saw four years ago.
'...if this is a message to Tony Blair, we've got news for you. We don't much like our government ourselves, or what they do in our name.'
If there is laughter through tears so soon after a tragedy like this, here it is... Queen Elizabeth: "We will not change our way of life." Here it is again... a ticker on The Guardian Unlimited site above Thursday's tragic headlines: "Bush: 'I'm ok' after bike spill."
Maybe I am wrong, and London will simply absorb this as it absorbed the IRA bombs, the Kings Cross fire, the devastation of the Blitz. The Great Fire, the Plague. Maybe through Live 8, the Olympic win, the anti-war demonstrations, Londoners have already taken their stand. Maybe after 9/11 it takes more than this to sting us, since in our imaginations we have already lived out this tragedy in our imaginary Londons, and ones much worse.
Maybe there are poppies in this field that will never be seen together. Far away from the bombings last Thursday, in North Carolina, my aunt phoned my mother to ask whether I was safe and with that effectively ended a family feud. I am not saying this justifies the loss and ruin of lives, but it hints at the million ripples of goodness that quietly outdo a single evil act.
