Shark Attack!

I normally don’t do news. Except in the quiz each week and in occasional reports on some of the stranger thing we humans do.

Most of my news comes from the mass media which I tend to mock, believing there is often another story behind that which has been reported.

A week ago there was a shark attack at a beach on the south coast of Western Australia, A woman swam out to the victim and dragged him to shore, ignoring the shark which was still swimming around. Despite the obvious heroism of that woman, there was nothing in the news which made me think of mentioning the incident here on the archive.

Wandering around the blogipelago tonight I dropped in on one of the blogs on my blogroll I found a report on the incident. A report from a witness to the aftermath. A report with that human touch which is so often lost, even in “human interest stories”, as a reporter’s work goes through the mill of editorial adjustment.

Reading the report, I felt a wider importance to the story. This was one single shark attack in a remote part of the world. The news reports from the cyclone in Burma and the earthquake in China neatly sandwiched this story in time.

There is an honesty and a vulnerability in the writing on the shark attack which is not obvious in the news reports of the larger disasters. It is humbling to transfer the trauma and the reactions of the beachgoers in Albany to the millions of human stories which we learn about in the mass yet we are not touched by the individual tragedies in Burma and China.

As JB Priestly said, “I can’t help feeling wary when I hear anything said about the masses. First you take their faces from ‘em by calling ‘em the masses and then you accuse ‘em of not having any faces.“

Maybe I am thinking too deeply here - so for something from a face within the masses, visit Jon Doust’s blog.