….I was added by someone setting up a bebo site for Madeleine McCann yesterday. For once in my life I choose not to accept the invite. But I’m still not sure why. See, I suppose that on one hand I can appreciate that there are many people who genuinely are touched by this girl and her families plight. Yet on the other hand, it nearly strikes me as being tremendously wrong to even set up such a site.
Twenty Major has hit part of it talking here and here about how ‘wrong’ it can strike you that this family are getting so much money that they don’t really need from the whole incident, but that’s only part of it. My housemate when I was talking to him about it said that the family might not be able to pull enough cash together at the moment (or may not be able to pull themselves together enough), they might need the money for the therapy that Madeleine could need (assuming she’s still alive, which to be honest I kind of doubt) or that they may simply just donate the money to some charity or fund after she’s found alive and well (and to be honest, considering that most people don’t really know where the money they give to charities go to anyway, it’s not like those who have given money can complain).
What disturbs me more in the way that its been dealt with I guess… I mean, there’s the blatant element of ‘she’s a pretty blonde white girl from England and her parents are rich so she’s more important’ going on in this story. I mean,how many people have donated money to ‘help’ who simply ignore the ‘Trocaire’ ads or their equivalent? There’s also the fact that the parents don’t need that money, the fact that there are big businessmen and corporations donating ‘rewards’ and incentives to find her. And who here doesn’t believe that at some point there wasn’t a conversation that went ”the money we offer is half what we’ll get back in free advertising!”
But what also disturbs me about it is the ‘pretending to care’ element. I mean, lets be honest, most of the newscasters, pundits, businessmen etc. don’t care less about this girl. She’s just another person that has gone missing /died that you’ll never meet. Boris Johnson talked about this a bit in his ‘have I got views for you’ book when Ken Bigley came up. As he pointed out, in some ways when that murder happened there was this tremendous public grief of a sort yet he also noticed an element of people rebelling at it (he uses the example of a minutes silence at a football game being interrupted by a crowd who were more interested in the game than in some guy they never met and didn’t care about).
Yes, there is something to be said of the benefits of having her face on the news. The odds are that the more people are aware of the story the more likely that if she is still alive that she may be seen by somebody somewhere and found. But, this public gnashing of teeth disturbs me when its not like most people (if they’re honest) really give a damn.
I know this post has been a bit pointless and rambly, but I still feel that ‘a bebo page for Madeleine’ is wrong and there is something wrong that it would even happen to exist.
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