Selfie vultures swarm to terror attack
There were many images from Wednesday’s Westminster terror attack too graphic to broadcast. People thrown from the bridge to The Embankment by the force of the car’s impact, or lying still in the cycle lanes; video of desperate CPR attempts. But it wasn’t just the blood on the ground, the broken bodies pixilated, or the anguished faces of witnesses that affected me. You can also count in the social media vultures.
When I say affected, I mean disgusted. There are reports of multiple losers taking pictures of themselves in front of the carnage as if they’d just run into Ed Sheeran down the pub.
The internet was not at all pleased by this gross show of insensitivity. One man advised a culprit to ‘‘shove his selfie stick up his a...’’
The morons rarely stop and think when they whip out their smartphones to duckface on these occasions. It’s a single moment in time for them; blink and it’s gone (and they’ll have to take another where their eyes are open this time.)
Terror attacks take this to another level, but car accidents, funerals, and memorial sites have been fair game for ages. There’s even a Tumblr site specially for them. It’s called Selfies At Serious Places; a teenager apologised after the grinning pic he took at the European Holocaust Memorial appeared on the site. Sorry for being such a dick, he said. No kidding.
Thank goodness then for people like MP Tobias Ellwood, who ran towards the danger and tried with all his strength to save PC Keith Palmer. His army training probably overrode any trace of ‘‘bystander effect’’, but this man had more excuse than most to freeze in shock while the chaos swirled around him; his brother was killed in another terror attack, the Bali bombings, in 2002.
Perhaps that’s what made him act. It certainly made the rest of us proud of him, at a moment we all really needed it.