Asian Angle | Why can’t Hong Kong honour the bravest of them all after she died in a knife attack?
- Double murder of two young women at a shopping centre raises questions about the meaning of bravery and cowardice, and the unpredictability of human nature
- While five people were honoured for their attempts to stop the attack, there was no posthumous award for the woman who died while trying to save her companion
What would you do if a leisurely evening at a shopping centre erupted into shocking violence, with a knife-wielding maniac suddenly stabbing people at random?
And what if a woman was being stabbed repeatedly in this sustained rampage, while the only person trying desperately and unsuccessfully to save her was her companion at the scene? Would you help?
Be completely honest now, because you would be answering only to yourself in this hypothetical situation, without fear of any judgment by others.
And now the medals for bravery that the government handed out this month as part of its annual Honours List have left me wondering about our official metrics for quantifying and rewarding levels of courage. Surely this also merits further contemplation on the wider meaning of bravery itself as a subjective concept and, by inverse corollary, what constitutes cowardice.
Over decades of working as a professional journalist, I have watched more video clips of shocking, deeply disturbing, real-life violence than any normal person should have to in a lifetime – not to derive any sense of twisted, voyeuristic entertainment but rather to acquire the better understanding and context that the nature of my job demands.
And of all those video clips, which have accumulatively desensitised me to some extent, the one capturing the senseless savagery of the shopping centre attack in Hong Kong, my home city and still one of the safest urban centres in the world, bothers me the most.
