excessive public display of grief

london
I was chatting to my friend, david, over the phone and he said he has been watching a film about the titanic, and observing that there have been hell of a lot of this rehashing of the sinking on tv recently.
it is the 100 anniversary of the sinking so i guess that is understandable.


It is interesting that we never associate it with the terror of being stuck in a ship that is sinking. somehow no one had made the association otherwise cruise ships would never be so popular. films like the titanic and poseidon adventure do not make us fearful of cruise ships. Why?  Somehow we seem to think that modern cruise ships will not sink.  Until a film i saw recently on tv made up of the home made videos of people who survived the sinking of the Concordia brought home to me how awful it is when a ship sinks. Even then the actual footage did not dwell on the panic and fear and u have to read between the lines to get a sense of the panic that people felt.

Added. 20.4.12 saw this article in vanity fair, which gives a full account of what happened to concordia. it seems it was lucky that the ship got grounded instead of sinking in deep waters. those passengers dont realise that many of them would be dead if it did sink in deep waters. what the article said is right, that this sinking is a new reference to replace the sinking of the titanic which has for many years been the yardstick for a sinking ship.


I know we as human beings, seem to ignore danger. we know many people die in car crashes, yet we take the car without a moment's thought. maybe just as well, otherwise we shall never progress.
it the same with airplanes, when they crash, there is low chances of getting out of it alive, yet we all take the plane like nobodies business...


and we went on to observe there is also a lot of public show of grief at any deaths, especially of children, whether singly or multiple. 
There was even a editorial in the telegraph about it. I like the description the editor used to describe such people as 'gazing into the mirror and welling up at the thought of how simply wonderful we are in the face of other people’s misfortunes.'


Why the excessive display of breast beating?
My friend said the old english stiff upper lip seems to have gone. 
I replied that no, it hasn't. it is just that so many people from other cultures have landed in the uk, that they have brought over their own customs.
In other cultures, it is expected that u go over the top when u grief. The public display is important to tell all that u are grieving.


I know from my own culture, the s.e.asian experience, where mourners wail and weep, and tear their hair and their clothes and go into hysterics... and it is entirely expected by spectators. in fact it is showing respect for the dead, that u show such public grief over the deaths and it shows how much u revere the person who died. it is a fact that people hire professional mourners to do this OTT display. 


So i am saying that such cultural displays have now come to these united kingdom shores. 


In a way, throughout history, we have accepted death and consider it normal and that when a person dies he or she has finished their allotted time on earth and we send them off and carry on with our lives. 
When did this idea that death is terrible and we must do anything to delay it... i wonder? we seem to have gone very sentimental about death. 
interestingly , in India, we still get the old ways where people are pragmatic about death. Maybe there are plenty of places all over the world that also accepts death. it is only in the western media world that death gets a bad press.