I have been reading London newspapers on-line tonight.
My heart goes out to all of those people who are searching for their loved ones who are still missing tonight, nearly three days after the explosions in London that have left over 50 people dead, many unaccounted for, and more than 700 reported injured.
In (earlier) today's
Guardian Unlimited:
At least 31 people are missing and, like London itself, they are from every faith, color and background and include a tour guide who was to be married, an advertising trainee in the excitement of a first job, and a financial adviser from Zimbabwe. Today the ordinary men and women missing feared dead in the London bombings are a series of numbers logged at an emergency casualty bureau: N139, N681, N322.
Underneath the grainy pictures the words: "Missing", "Please help" and "Have you seen this man?" were scrawled by desperate relatives seeking some flicker of hope that their loved ones had caught a different bus, opted to cycle or not boarded the usual tube on an everyday journey to work.
The stories of those missing that follow enlist people of many different ages, ethnicities, and religions. What they all share are the fact of their status as missing and that they have frantic loved ones searching for them.
This is all so evocative of the aftermath of 9/11, when New York City reeled with the desperate rounds from hospital to hospital by friends and family of those missing in the attack on the World Trade Center; When the city was papered with fliers showing the faces of mothers and sons in happier times; When the commuter lots of train stations in New Jersey, Long Island, and Connecticut were littered with cars that were not retrieved by fathers and daughters who never came home.
London has become the sorrowful sister of New York City. I only wish there was some way for us here in America, more recently trained through circumstance than she, to absorb some of the enormous pain, fear, and anger that her citizens feel tonight.
Surely there is a way for us to turn this terror against itself by reaching out to each other across nations to comfort each other and, by doing so, remind each other and ourselves that our task as human beings is to aid and accompany each other through both wonderful and terrible times.
Each of us alone is so small and afraid. Together, we might stand strong and brave. If we could only learn how to share sorrow across continents and over oceans. Maybe then, the brush fire of rampant fear and hatred that is loose in the world would burn itself out and, exhausted by its own fury, flicker into nothingness.
In the meantime, I can only sit here in my American home, late at night, and feel a painful echo of deep sorrow, so evident in the faces of sleepless Brits, so far away.