Somehow, the story about the Malaysian airplane that was shot down became a lot more real to me when I learned that it was flying out of Amsterdam and that more than half of the passengers were Dutch. It turns out to be even closer than that: one of Ted’s colleagues, someone he liked, invited to our going-away party in the Netherlands, and was hoping to have visit us here, was on Malaysian Airlines flight MH317 with his wife and 2 kids, on their way to vacation in Malaysia.
Ted heard they were on the flight yesterday (they found out while he was in a meeting with someone who reported to that guy) but didn’t have it confirmed until this morning. I was thinking about it yesterday and realized it didn’t even matter: whether it was someone I or my spouse knew or not, any direct flight from A’dam to Malaysia in July is by definition going to have lots of families on it, heading off to vacation.
What kept resounding in my brain were the poems in this Making Light comment thread, and their refrain: “At least I know that all my friends are fine — (The dead are someone else’s friends, not mine.)” Well, they’re my friends after all, or at least my husband’s friends. ANd maybe that doesn’t matter – no matter who they worked with, parents and children were shot down on that flight, as they headed off happily on vacation.
On an emotional level, that bothers me even more than the significant number of AIDS researchers on the plane (they were all heading to a conference in Melbourne), though I think the loss of the researchers may be an even greater blow to more people.
I feel a tiny bit better hearing now that it was likely a mistake, and that shooters thought they were firing at a military plane – better even that, even if it’s almost the most horrible mistake you can imagine (second only to “Oops, my finger slipped onto that big red button”) than that people shot down those families on purpose.