tired fools

although interested (obviously) in suicide, the posts that come up on my rss feeds relating to murder-suicides i ignore. there are a lot of them. days go by when they are all there are. some guy who’s been dumped by his girlfriend kills her, maybe a kid or two, then turns out his own light. then, of course, you get the big ones, the suicide bombers.

i’ve become steadily more irked by the coverage in the media of the london “suicide bombings”. i have as much at stake as the next guy when it comes to murdering passengers on london transport systems, i travel on it most days, yet the only big deal is that it’s happening here. today at least 60 people died in a suicide bombing in baghdad. yesterday it was 40. And it happens every day.

the speculation is on why some “home grown” would do such a thing. from the times:

The current wave of bombers no longer comes purely from the poor and downtrodden classes seeking a way out of poverty and their desperate lives. It also includes young men and women from the middle classes with a high level of education and a profession.

“We are educated strugglers,” claimed Yunis, a 27-year-old Palestinian graduate I met while he was preparing for a mission. “We are not terrorists and the world should recognise that our acts are not intended to be pure, cold-blooded murder.”

Curiously, he had begun our conversation by talking of his love for art and the paintings of Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and Picasso before abruptly changing the subject to his impending “martyrdom”.

the parent’s of one bomber have apologised, saying that their son must have been brainwashed. perhaps. equally possible is that he was bored, “crucially bored” as christopher hitchens diagnosed hs thompson, “boredom is a physical threat to some people.”

Tag: suicide