A PLANE falling out of the Ukrainian sky into a deadly war zone featuring a once strangulated post-Soviet Russia, must constitute a global tragedy.
Expect quick findings by crash investigators and the usual depressingly convoluted diplomatic chatter of threats to freeze assets and dreary boycott agenda.
That will pass, leaving Malaysians contemplating, in geographical solitude, the second Boeing 777-200 catastrophe in four months. The gasps and OMG exclamations you came across in the last 24 hours characterise a nation, at this very instance, in a despondent mode.
As an aside, one could sense Tan Sri Abdul Khalid Ibrahim, the menteri besar of Selangor, earning a respite in the battle to keep his job amid an onslaught launched by allies. Politicking shall be frowned upon in the next week or so for an affliction has lodged in the collective consciousness.
First of all, MH370 was an insidious devastation throwing up no closure. That it was trauma delivered in little doses was not apparent right to the time MH17 was reduced to smithereens in Europe, killing 298.
It has generated this hauntingly personal and emotional images of next-of-kin recounting the most riveting stories of relationships and desires to spend time with loved ones. It made you wish to go home right away for a conversation with your son.
What we Malaysians are experiencing is a situation of real-life human drama versus two mysterious aviation tragedies.
Malaysia has pulled itself out of economic crises, one was debilitating as the CI of the stock market plunged to 262 points, partly because this was a tangible situation of numbers and remedies.
There is this WhatsApp group
of college mates who turned for quick updates and immediate
analyses to a clan member serving in Moscow as Malaysians went
into near-convulsion on learning the horrifying news from Ukraine on Thursday night.
The biggest contribution of their Russian link was to egg the chat group’s administrator into replacing the celebratory sounding Hari Raya Aidilfitri tagline. It now reads “PT6: ALFATIHA SDRA2KU”.
We are mourning, surrepti-
tiously.
A father in despairing northern-speak came on television at a busy newsroom yesterday morning, saying he longed to see his son, feared dead in the MH17 tragedy.
Those words accompanied you to Friday prayers in time to hear the imam deliver this line — one could not be sure he will be alive around the time of breaking fast tonight.
No nation would be able to legislate against a commercial plane making an astonishing turnback before vanishing.
The second tragedy has been diametrically opposite but no less intriguing.
MH370’s black box battery went dead as a detector was approaching. Two black boxes of MH17 had been reportedly found within 24 hours. There is a simple logic attached to this, inland crash versus one shooting beyond the radar range.
The judgment — Malaysians are simply not ready for this. Journalism does not prepare anyone to catalogue the human drama arising from the rarest and weirdest of human tragedies.
Journalism has, over the years, also erected multiple walls against preachy tones in favour of celebrating individualism, free speech and to deepen the power of reasoning.
None of these could, however, heal the sorrow of a 72-year-old matriarch in Sarawak who lost six loved ones in the blink of an eye.
So, a reporter thoroughly distressed by the back-to-back Boeing 777-200 globally dissected incidents occurring 138 days apart cannot now muster an argument, beyond repeating a plea — Pray for Malaysia.
Indeed, the final eight days of Ramadan offers Muslims a fascinating prospect of deeply cleansing prayers and Quran recitals.