www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/s1051857.htm
Report slams recreational grieving trend Ostentatious displays of public mourning such as the outpouring of grief in Britain after the 1997 death of Princess Diana have become a cheap emotional fix replacing real emotion, according to a new report. The report by leading political think-tank Civitas says people are kidding themselves in the way they display their sorrow. It says the British have shed their traditional emotional reserve to indulge in recreational grief for dead celebrities and crime victims, so as to feel better about themselves. This sort of grief lite was undertaken as an enjoyable event, much like going to a football match, the Civitas group charged in an 80-page report. Within days of Dianas death in a car crash in Paris, the streets outside Buckingham Palace in London were carpeted in thousands of floral wreaths. A similar tumult of emotion was uncorked by the murders in 2002 of schoolgirls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, a case which transfixed the nation. The mourning for Diana was indicative of an age characterised by crocodile tears and manufactured emotion, the reports author, Patrick West, wrote. He says the only statement people are making in mass grieving is what nice people they all are. Ostentatious caring allows a lonely nation to forge new social bonds, he said. He noted that immediately after her death, Dianas memory seemed likely to live forever. Yet, on the fifth anniversary of her death in August 2002, there were no crowds, tears or teddies. The murders of Holly and Jessica exemplified another phenomenon, the report said, that of grief tourism, as busloads of visitors arrived in the schoolgirls home town to show their sorrow. Additionally, the traditional show of remembrance of tragedy through a minute of silence at public events had now become meaningless through compassion inflation. People were now expected to hold, in some instances, up to five minutes silence for increasingly less important events. There is seemingly a case of compassion inflation, with individuals and organisations seeking to prove how much more they care by elongating the silences, the report said. When a group called Hedgeline calls for a two-minute silence to remember all the victims whose neighbours have grown towering hedges, we truly have reached the stage where this gesture has been emptied of meaning.
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