Monday, July 08, 2013

The Worst Possible Could Have Happened... But Didn't

I read about the Asiana Air Crash in San Francisco while I drank my coffee and ate my muesli this morning.

The budget Chinese airline. Poor bastards, how awful.

It is all drama, of course. Now, don’t get me wrong, it is a big drama, no doubt about it. However, the language the witnesses and the survivors used struck me as pure news-break sensationalism, all the way.

Eyewitnesses and survivors have described the aftermath scene as chaos, naturally. Even so, nearly all of the 307 people aboard the plane made it out alive.

But everyone seemed to focus in on what could have happened, what the outcome could have been.

"It's miraculous we survived," said a passenger, who had a fractured collarbone and whose arm was in a sling.

“We are lucky we didn’t all die,” said another.

"I think we're very thankful that the numbers were not worse when it came to fatalities and injuries," said National Transportation Safety Board chief

"When you heard that explosion, that loud boom and you saw the black smoke ... you just thought, my god, everybody in there is gone," said a neighbour, who lives a few miles away from the airport and who watched the plane's approach from his balcony.

But, everyone "wasn’t gone", everybody didn’t die. Is this the “news headline” mentality that we all live under now? Journalists, television stations, and the like, sensationalise the news to the to the nth degree? It seems that individuals are doing it now. Have we  all been brainwashed by the media? Seduced by the drama, our lives have become a 24 hour news cycle.

And while ten, or so, passengers are in a critical condition in hospital, and more are injured, only two have died and one of those may have been hit by a fire engine rushing to the scene of the accident after she escaped the plane wreck.

It is alleged that two teenagers were killed in the crash and one of those teenagers was hit by an emergency vehicle on the ground and was killed. Everybody else survived. Surely, that kind of makes it a good news story, only two people died. Yay, for everybody else surviving. Okay, that is a bit of a stretch, but I am sure you know what I mean. Aren’t we always encouraged to be glass half full people?

Shake of the head, that doesn’t sell the news. (That doesn't give Murdoch the money to pay his billion dollar divorce settlement)

There were 35 students and staff en route to a Christian church and school. I’m guessing, as is the usual Christian idiocy, no doubt God was looking after them, God saved their lives. Nothing about God making the plane crash in the first place.

What about the girl who got hit by the fire engine, I wonder what her take on God would be?

I guess she wouldn’t be laughing, thinking, wow God that really is a cunt act, you know. What a black sense of humour.

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