Understanding Reality

My mother struggled to understand why London was bombed the day after the Olympic 2012 vote in downtown Singapore.

"Boy ah, is it because the French sore loser ah?" she enquired.

It was almost surreal, or in John Cheng's words, "poetic", how London was celebrating clinching the right to host the 2012 Olympics one day and how Londoners were shocked by a spate of bomb blasts that crippled their public transport system the next.

The timing was almost uncanny. Many had first assumed that it was caused by the Olympic vote. Paris was the favourite, so the media says. So it was an upset of sorts. London bid leader, Sebastian Coe was the chef de mission. The British Prime Minister, the chief persuant.

The conspiracists among us suspected some deviant pro-Paris groups. But the informed would also realise that the blasts occurred on the first day of the G8 meeting held at Gleneagles Hotel in Perthshire, Scotland - the very meeting that Tony Blair had to leave Singapore prematurely for.

Some obscure group linking itself to the Al-Queda claimed responsibility for the attacks on the London Tube and the double decker bus that claimed 50 lives so far. While the claim remains to be verified, the death toll is sure to increase given how Scotland Yard reported how the corpses at the scene of the underground blasts are so mangled, they are at their hair's end deciding what to do about it.

When news first broke locally at around 4 in the afternoon, it shattered the anti-climatic calm that descended on the Raffles City Convention Centre after the much anticipated Olympic vote the night before.

Meanwhile, Ken Livingstone did a "Rudy Giuliani" at the lobby of the Swissotel The Stamford in Singapore. Although his hasty press conference harks an echo back to the terrorist attack of all terrorist attacks in 2001, whether he would be able to live up to Giuliani's steerly leadership post 9-11 remains to be seen.

"So why they want to bomb London. The meeting not there what," my mom went on probing, testing my limited patience brought on by fatigue.

The significance of London is probably similar to that of New York. It is probably the terrorists, who in the name of Islam, claim that this is a victory against "those Western infidels."

A clash of civilisations that invokes references to the Crusades of years past. It may have been in the distant past, but I reckon wounds run deep.

But my mother's difficulty in comprehending the chain of events struck me deep.

While the many journalists and many wannabe ones like me are able to make some sense of the events as we analyse and attach links to other associated developments, does our analysis make it any easier to "understand" the mammoth insanity that has unfolded over the last 5 years?

Perhaps Mom's lack of comprehension is not due to her inate lack of ability, but rather a result of her heightened consciousness that untainted by mankind's rationality, is able to perceive the situation for what it is.