Dear worried Americans (and Canadians)
Jul. 7th, 2005 04:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
baratronI can't pretend to speak for all Londoners, but for the ones I do speak for...
I imagine it's worse for you because of 9/11 flashbacks, but we're ok. Seriously. London has been dealing with bombs since the Blitz in WWII. We had the IRA blowing up parts of London and SE England for 25 years, forgodsake. Even despite their ceasefire, we still have reinforced post boxes and litter bins on the streets, and no litter bins on public transport. (This was the thing that amazed me most about recent travels in the US - the authorities claiming they were afraid of attack, yet there were bins everywhere - even in the airports!)
I grew up halfway between Sandhurst Military Academy (where Prince Harry is going) and Aldershot, the home of the British Army. We had a bomb scare every other week, and about 1/4 of them turned out to be real bombs. Evacuating Marks & Spencer to go and sit in McDonalds for half an hour until we got the all-clear was just what we did. You just pay attention to any unattended bags or packages, and get on with it.
I remember the Selfridges bomb, the bomb on the rail line between Brookwood and Woking, the Canary Wharf bomb, the bus that blew up along the Strand... all ones that people I know were caught up in. Only a few years ago, a lone nut decided to nailbomb parts of London associated with ethnic minorities and queers - the bomb blowing up the Admiral Duncan pub in Soho affected me deeply, not least of all because Richard's work is just round the corner from it and one of his co-workers only narrowly escaped injury. But we survived. The pub is still standing, and features a memorial to the people who died - and I urge anyone interested in queer history to go there and see.
We've had terrorists, nuts and loons for longer than I've even been alive. This is just another one of those things. It's tragic for the families of the people killed, but they can't get us all. They didn't manage it in WWII. They won't manage it now.
P.S. I don't often agree with him, but Go Ken!
I imagine it's worse for you because of 9/11 flashbacks, but we're ok. Seriously. London has been dealing with bombs since the Blitz in WWII. We had the IRA blowing up parts of London and SE England for 25 years, forgodsake. Even despite their ceasefire, we still have reinforced post boxes and litter bins on the streets, and no litter bins on public transport. (This was the thing that amazed me most about recent travels in the US - the authorities claiming they were afraid of attack, yet there were bins everywhere - even in the airports!)
I grew up halfway between Sandhurst Military Academy (where Prince Harry is going) and Aldershot, the home of the British Army. We had a bomb scare every other week, and about 1/4 of them turned out to be real bombs. Evacuating Marks & Spencer to go and sit in McDonalds for half an hour until we got the all-clear was just what we did. You just pay attention to any unattended bags or packages, and get on with it.
I remember the Selfridges bomb, the bomb on the rail line between Brookwood and Woking, the Canary Wharf bomb, the bus that blew up along the Strand... all ones that people I know were caught up in. Only a few years ago, a lone nut decided to nailbomb parts of London associated with ethnic minorities and queers - the bomb blowing up the Admiral Duncan pub in Soho affected me deeply, not least of all because Richard's work is just round the corner from it and one of his co-workers only narrowly escaped injury. But we survived. The pub is still standing, and features a memorial to the people who died - and I urge anyone interested in queer history to go there and see.
We've had terrorists, nuts and loons for longer than I've even been alive. This is just another one of those things. It's tragic for the families of the people killed, but they can't get us all. They didn't manage it in WWII. They won't manage it now.
P.S. I don't often agree with him, but Go Ken!
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-07-07 05:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-07 06:33 pm (UTC)Not everyone's taking it calmly, of course, and that's fine. People react in different ways, and a lot of people I know were a lot closer to the explosions than I was.
Of course, if whoever did this has a stockpile of devices, this may happen again tomorrow, or next week. That'd shake us a bit. But, for now, it's not actually a world-changing event for most people in London.
It was also, let's be honest, not on the scale of the destruction of the World Trade Centre, nor does it signal such a horrible change in the rules by which terrorism operated as that did.
no subject
Date: 2005-07-07 07:17 pm (UTC)But people seem to be getting faster and faster at communicating "I'm all right" and then just getting on with their lives.
By mid-afternoon we were comparing notes on near-misses - it turns out another colleague also missed the King's Cross fire by the same small amount as I did, to the extent that we must have been in the station at the same time, 10 years before we actually met at work. Most people are already getting on with their lives and will reserve their worry for those that need it. There's no sense of panic here, but I'm still answering messages from people that know I used to live and/or work in London, and still visit often. I'm not that far from being more annoyed at my phone bill for responding to all those enquiries (HOW MUCH does it cost to send 5 text messages to Finland?!?) than the terrorists!
OK, I'm more cynical than most, but I got my worries 99% sorted by lunch-time.