West Coast (#31),
Mountbatten's Funeral was a State Occasion, and apart from the family, few would've been emotionally concerned. Diana's was admittedly a special case; it was the first time when something close to an unhealthy mass hysteria gripped the British people.
"Recreational Grieving" - what a good expression ! - is a comparitively new phenomenon, but now seems to becoming the norm here. I can only recall one occasion when a similar tragedy evoked such grief on a national scale: the Aberfan Disaster of 1966, where a colliery waste tip landslide buried alive 116 children and 28 adults in slurry.
"Either way, you're not going to stiff upper lip yourself out of a mass murder, especially of children". True, but you have to consider what lay behind it. "Don't get mad - Get even ", should be our watchword.
ISIL make no bones about it, they consider us "infidels", and as such wish to kill us. Unable to do so on any scale, they determine to terrify us out of our normal lives, to disrupt them in order to break our morale. This Hitler attempted, and failed. This our War Cabinet attempted (it is shameful to try to shuffle it off onto Harris) on the Third Reich - and failed. ISIL must also fail - and be seen to fail.
They openly declare a Holy War on us, very well, "C'ést la Guerre". If their "terrorism" interrupts our normal concerns to any extent, then they will have succeeded - they have "won" - and are emboldened to try again and again. On the contrary, if we merely report their attack, and then make no song-and-dance about it, but just get on with our normal lives, then their "terror" has achieved nothing. If we continue in that way, they may very well give up, as "the game is no longer worth the candle".
Danny42C.