I’m sure those of you in England and Europe are possibly sick of, or saddened by, all the coverage today on the 20th anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster, but I only noticed the date from a rather emotional Metafilter thread I saw a few hours ago. Wow, 20 years.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, it was a tragedy at a football (soccer) stadium in Sheffield, England where, due to bad crowd control, 96 people were crushed to death. By the crowd.
The whole story boggles my mind, even now. I remember when it happened, because both my dad and stepdad were football fans and I was often forced to watch matches on Saturday mornings when I really would’ve preferred cartoons. I remember Dad asking me about it, too, the next time I was at his place. And I remember it never really made sense.
While I recall watching video footage of the crowd pushing onto the field, and of a few people being pulled up out of the crush by people hanging over the upper stands, my 11-year-old brain was confused. People die from being hit by other people. Or being shot by other people. Or by falling. They don’t die from being squished, right? Nobody dies of too many people around you.
I’ve always tended to push out of my head things that were beyond my comprehension, and due to the lack of further news coverage at home I compartmentalized the memory to just images from the TV and the connection to Dad’s family (he grew up in Sheffield) and erased the bit about the deaths. I think it was only a few years ago, maybe even when looking it up on Wikipedia, that I relearned the specifics.
What I didn’t know, until today, was about the aftermath, how the Sun newspaper originally blamed Liverpool hooliganism for the deaths, and how much the police screwed up that day but nobody was made accountable (to any satisfying degree) for the tragedy. “Justice for the 96″. After 20 years, you’d think people would’ve been granted closure.
But, going back to the cause of death, I still don’t get it. I do, but I don’t. What an inhuman way to die, by the crush of a crowd of regular people, fellow sports fans, pushing against you, none of them with angry or violent intentions towards you or anyone around you. The SPCA shuts down farms for putting animals in these conditions.
Today is also the start of the Stanley Cup playoffs, so I hope my friends who go to the Canucks games (may there be many) will appreciate that good stadium design and crowd management is helping keep them safe, because otherwise we’d never give it a second thought. Maybe we should.