By N.S.
"last surviving teacher of Aberfan disaster still remembers faces of the children who died"
"this story contains upsetting details that some may find distressing"
Until recently, you never saw such warnings. They're called "trigger warnings," and they were introduced by members of affirmative action groups in colleges several years ago, for purely political reasons, having nothing to do with this story, or stories like it.
Note the bad writing in the ten-word warning above. It only required five words--"this story contains upsetting details," yet its editor doubled its length. And yet, there are no "upsetting details"; they were censored. Meanwhile, all sorts of words ("colliery") and phrases were left unexplained (e.g., why so many children died, and why some survived).
A "colliery" is a coal mine (I had to look it up). Most people in the restaurant trade are familiar with "slurry" as a form of liquid substance for making sauce or soup with corn starch and liquid, but it is not at all clear to this reader how 116 school children and 28 adults perished in the Aberfan disaster. And why would so many adults have died? Am I not permitted to ask those questions? The "thing" provides no answers.
The operative who wrote this "thing" is named Huw Thomas. The Welsh narrator of Richard Llewellyn's novel, How Green was My Valley, which Ford made into his eponymous, 1941 masterpiece (which featured the collapse of a coal mine), was named "Huw Morgan" (played by Roddy McDowall).
"In the wake of the Aberfan disaster - when a colliery spoil tip [?] collapsed, slid down a mountain and engulfed the village's primary school and surrounding houses - teachers were asked to confirm the names of the dead children before they were cleaned up and their parents told."
Mair: "I found that very hard. Thinking back, in this day and age, they wouldn't have asked you to do it."
Why not?
Why would one ask teachers "to confirm the names of the dead children BEFORE they were cleaned up"? Wouldn't you clean up the dead kids first, and then identify them? As I said, the "thing" is terrible, but it has its trigger warning.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2407zy9zxo?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
(Shouldn't the only "trigger warning" necessary be one at the top of any news outlet, saying, "If you need a 'trigger warning,' you're unfit to be reading any news articles"?)
1 comment:
Never heard of it but mother nature is the biggest mass murderer on the planet--and will be as long as the earth rotates. In this story,man might have contributed--I'm not sure,because I'm not familiar. If dynamiting was going on in this spot,there you go. If not...there you go.
--GRA
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