Beslan (somewhat disorganised ramble)

[muninnhuginn]

I've found it very hard over the last few days getting Looby Loo settled back into school whilst replaying in the back of mind the images from Beslan. I don't think that Looby Loo's been aware of those events: wall-to-wall kiddy TV rather removes the intrusion of news bulletins. I'm partly relieved by that: there are better ways of learning about what's going on in the outside world (not that I think that she should be entirely insulated in a disneyfied bubble, just that I wouldn't wish for her awareness to start there). Maybe in this media-glutted age the impact of first images and stories from the wider world is lessened, but I'm not sure. I've always wondered just how much my own view of the world was shaped by those first memories of "great events", in my case the first moon walk and then, a few years later, the deaths at the Munich Olympics (at least the first one was positive). But there are simply things it would be better that a five-year old should not see. It would be better still, of course, if those same things just did not happen.

Rather banally, one of the first things that struck me, listening to (or reading) an interview with an anxious grandmother during the early part of the siege was the age of the kids. The lady in question was talking about her six-year old granddaughter going off to school for the first time. This little girl is--I hope, and not was--quite possibly a year older than my LL, who's just gone back to school for her second year, complaining after just two days that she's not allowed to play until after afternoon break. We have our hidden barbarities here.

Not that I'd want to in any way belittle the tragedy of the deaths because the victims were older than my small child: the death each child, adult, whether civilian, soldier or terrorist, is an appalling waste. But the youth of the victims is all the more painful.

I found almost as shocking as the siege and its violent resolution the material poverty I saw on the TV pictures: unmetalled roads, poor housing, children fleeing for their lives their ribcages prominent (and not simply through missing a couple of days food and drink). I know unpardonably little about those back-of-beyond fringe areas of the great empires, fragmented or otherwise.

But these people have values that are laudable. The anxious grandmother (the end of whose story, happy or sad, I'll never see) described how she sent her granddaughter off to school, the little girl dressed in her best clothes carrying a bunch of flowers. These people really celebrate the new school year. This impression was confirmed by the video from a couple of years ago shown on Newsnight yesterday evening of the children processing in the schoolyard with flags and balloons in their hands, all smiles and hopes. Balloons, not bombs. Whilst I'm not the best one for ritual and celebration, I don't think I'm unusual in that I merely sent my child back to school washed and neatly dressed, but with no great fanfare and flowers.

Perhaps I'll just have to hope that the worst LL learns there of peril and danger is what to do during a fire practice--and never has to remember the difference between a fire alarm and a bomb alarm (if I remember correctly close windows and doors and leave your stuff for the former and open windows and doors and pick up your bag for the latter).

Comments

[purpletigron.livejournal.com]

I can't even be this coherent about it all :-(

[armb.livejournal.com]

Ken MacLeod (http://kenmacleod.blogspot.com/2004_09_01_kenmacleod_archive.html) mentions the tradition of taking flowers for the teacher in the former Soviet Union. Here sending chocolates to the teachers on the last school day of the year seems more common.