Last time an event like the London bombing occurred I deliberately left this page blank in what I thought might be the blogger’s version of half-mast. This time I just didn’t post. It’s not that I didn’t care. It’s that I cared enough that if I didn’t have anything significant, or sympathetic, to say, then I should just do something else, out of respect.
The Queen had something significant to say. Speaking today, the day before the anniversary of the ending of World War II, she said words to the effect of “Carry on”. (No-one seems to have put online what I heard her say on radio this morning, so “carry on” will have to be the synposis.) No introspection. No self-pity. No deviation.
That’s all we can do. Wars used to be fought mostly at arm’s length. Now the frontline is behind us. Britain was the first to experience the modern retreating frontline in World War II. The young Princess Elizabeth knew about it as she drove ambulances in a London devastated by the Blitzkrieg. In comparison to the Blitzkrieg, this strike is pitiful. For Elizabeth, carrying-on must be, if not easy, getting habitual.
Violence is a part of life. Today, walking along my favourite beach in Forster with my youngest son we saw numbers of toad fish. They were all washed up and dead. Who knows why they died? There would have been more than 50 of them, but I doubt whether any toad fish news bulletins covered the incident. We’re the only animal that knows, or cares, when we die. That’s our fate, and our curse.
It seems to me that the British have got their response to the terrorists’ bombs just right. They have just carried on, almost as though it had never happened. How disempowering for the terrorists. You launch a co-ordinated attack, no doubt meant to be devastating, and 24 hours later it’s almost as though it never happened.
The other night at dinner someone asked me how I identified myself. “British” was my response. Not British, in the sense of being something other than Australian, but British in the sense of Australian culture being essentially British. In some ways it was a bold claim to make. I’m no Anglophile, I’m not infatuated with the United Kingdom, but that’s how one can easily be represented saying things like that. Rather, I recognise that my intellectual and moral heritage is basically British.
Tonight I think that while it might be a “bold claim” I hope it is one that I can personally demonstrate if I have to. London has shown us exactly the right way to deal with terrorism. Life is a numbers game, and Australia’s number will come up. When it does, I’d like to think that our behaviour will be British.