"About suffering they were never wrong..."

Sunday evening after working in the garden all day, watching"The Iron Lady" on Netflix. News footage of riots in Merrye Olde England are woven into the story. Maybe I saw this violence when Thatcher was PM, but I don't remember it . It's not the violence that shocks, it's how quickly we forget it. I saw some stories about the violence in the '70's in this country, the stuff parodied in "Network" (that's about the only way you'll see any reference to it now). Bombings and shootings were common, but our leaders didn't terrify us about "terrorism" so we took it in stride and buried it in our collective memory hole. I lived through regular reports of that violence, nut I'd forgotten it, too.

It's an interesting thing: we remember suffering, and forget violence. Maybe because one is always personal, and the other is always visited in others on our TeeVee screens. When it's personal, violence is still insignificant. It's our suffering after the violence that matters, for ourselves and others..