This morning I received a call from my mother. We have family returning from Europe this weekend and she was immediately concerned. I reassured her of the flight details and that I was sure there was no way they were travelling on the Malaysia Airlines passenger jet shot down over Ukraine.
Getting off the phone it struck me how many such phone calls were and are taking place all over Australian. The vast majority will be able to account for friends and family members overseas with different flight details and travel planes.
But with at least 27 Australians confirmed to have been on the flight, there will be no such reassurances for countless others who are making the same frantic phone calls.
When a major tragedy involving Australians occurs somewhere round the world, all the competing priorities we may personally have are immediately placed on hold, at least for a moment. We take stock. We consider if we could possibly know anyone affected. We express relief when we, hopefully, don’t. And then pause to consider how the incident will have irreparably affected others.
Nothing quite hits home like an airline crash. Especially given the familiarity of airline travel and being able to picture the cabin, the crew members, how the passengers were sitting and the food they may have been eating when tragedy struck. We can picture it because we’ve taken those flights, we’ve tried to imagine the sheer, uncontrollable terror of being on a plane that goes down. We’ve all considered that possibility of being a curious holidaymaker or business traveller making seemingly innocuous decisions regarding which flight to take take and when, only to wind up on the one unlucky one that happens to be doomed.
There are, of course, other tragedies occurring around us constantly that don’t quite get the attention of an airline crash. Accidents that occur in a fraction of a second that tear families apart and change lives forever. If they’re familiar to our existing circumstances — such as by involving a child of similar age to our own — we can’t help but stop and think, that could have been my child. That could have been my husband, or my sister, my mother, my brother, my father. It could have been my friend or colleague. And for somebody, somewhere, it will have been their ‘my’. And they will never be the same again.
Meanwhile, there are men, women and children caught up in large-scale tragedies all over the world that we will never hear or know about, or simply hope to forget. Indeed, when a major news story like an airline crash hits, our capacity to learn about such realities becomes even less. There’s only so much space for the ‘news’ we take in, no matter how many Google alerts we establish and feeds we create on Twitter. Indeed, other significant events occurring today won’t get the attention they should — such as the Israeli ground invasion in Gaza this morning, and the 153 Tamil Asylum seekers, including 37 children, who are being detained at sea in concerning conditions.
Our thoughts are with the families and friends of all those killed in the Malaysia Airlines flight. They too are with anyone who has experienced their own recent tragedy. They are also with those in Gaza, in the Ukraine, on a Customs ship in a mysterious location at sea, and anyone caught up in wider events and struggles beyond their control.