Wee Bairn, how’s this? The Brits still have something called Guy Fawkes Night - a celebration and rememberance of an attempt to blow up Parliament. Where no one got killed but the bloody conspirators.
When the Brits stop celebrating that, then maybe you can tell the US to shut up about 9/11.
I was shocked and really saddened when Princess Di died. She had so much going for her yet always seemed like a desperate high girl trying to win her boyfriend back. Parading around with Dodi Fayed was just so transparent and sad. She was an international, very photogenic celebrity who was lovely but flawed. A rather ordinary woman who lived an extraordinary life.
I agree, that it’s time to let her rest in peace. She died in a terrible, stupid, preventable accident. So let’s all move on.
My grandfather was in the RCAF in WWII. He lied about his height to enlist. (Strange but true) He worked for the phone company and retired as a high up manager-boss type. He raised ten children, cared for his elderly parents and aunt. Travelled. Loved history, and all kinds of interesting things. My grandfather got lost wandering (had Alzheimer’s type dementia) the day before Diana died, then he died the next afternoon. I gave him CPR (not with any hope of bringing him back, more to " be doing something", rode with my grandmother in the police car to the hospital and sat with her through the long process.
But yet, that day does not belong to me and my family, it belongs to biographies and retrospectives and a sappy rewritten Elton John song.
Im not much a fan of the modern monarchy… never was, but in the last ten years I hate everything Diana related. Shut up already. She was rich and blonde. Now she’s dead. So are a bunch of other people, namely one who was a hell of a lot more interesting to me.
I can’t believe people still give a damn so long after the fact. I like to keep BBC News on in the background and all they keep showing are those bloody CCTV pictures. The same bollocks every hour. There’s more coverage now then there was when she was alive! Even The Daily Mail had her on the front page, while Burma has been relegated to half a column somewhere on page 14.
You may have thought that, many people may have thought that, but a wealthy woman advised by the most knowledgeable doctors available knew for damn sure that there was no danger.
Oh go inhale your own farts, would you? Diana may have done a lot of charity, but she wasn’t a saint. Ooooh, she held AIDS babies! Oooh, what an angel!
She wasn’t the only royal who was charitable, and I could tell you many who did a HELL of lot more than she did.
Get over yourself.
Excuse me? I’m sure I misunderstood that last fragment. Would you mind going into a bit more detail?
Do what? We have this thing called Bonfire Night where we build bonfires and let off fireworks. Damn few of us pay any attention whatever to what it’s all about (and sad to say, “Penny for the Guy?” has long since given way to “Trick or treat!” half a week earlier, damn you). When it gets to the point that Americans are building cardboard towers with a plane stuck in them and setting them on fire while loosing off the odd rocket and eating toffee, then we’ll be comparing like with like.
Mind you, it is generally conceded that Guido Fawkes was the last man to enter Parliament with honest intentions. 
Let’s put it this way. Yes, I think she was generally a decent person. Yes, I think she contributed quite a bit. And her death WAS a damned shame, and pretty tragic, in that she was far too young to die, especially in such a manner.
BUT, I don’t think it’s nearly as tragic as September 11, or say, the assasination of Archbishop Romero, or the bombing at Columbine, or what have you. And it really, REALLY pisses me off for you to try and make it seem like it was.
I quite agree. Why should we act blase* about that? I fully expect there to be something going on in six and a half months.
*-How do I do the accent there?
[In case anybody missed it, check my location. I’m a freshman, so I wasn’t here then, but I was certainly aware of it, as was everyone else.]
Yeah, but it was 400 years ago, dude. 400 years from now, who knows what my descendants might be doing to commemorate the events of Sept. 11, 2001? 
(Given that we’re talking about putative Americans, I’m going to guess: nothing.)
I certainly don’t think that the reactions are parallel, though there are more similarities than you might want to admit - including both domestic pogroms and adventurism in Ireland, both in part because of anti-Catholic fervor roused in the wake of the Gunpowder Plot. I also have no intention of actually advocating that Brits and their former colonies forget Guy Fawkes Night, and am slightly disappointed to hear that it’s being supplanted by a US-inspired version of Halloween.
I liked Diama. She was lovely – a good mom and a crowd pleaser.
But would she have entered a burning building wearing heavy equipment and climbed up fifty flights to save people’s lives? A lot of firefighters did just that on September 11th. Someone else took the time to help a physically disabled person leave the building. I’m not talking about just a few flights of stairs.
Elsewhere on an aircraft, a group of men, aware that other planes had been used as weapons, took their own plane down rather than see it used by hijackers for destructive purposes. These are just examples.
Here are photographs of many of the people who lost their lives in the World Trade Center disaster. There are about one hundred photos on each page. How many human beings do you have to see before you can say that you have seen enough to equal one Diana?
Look at their faces. Look at their names.
Just because you don’t know them doesn’t mean that they aren’t interconnected with you. Their lives have influenced you and their deaths have also. It happens in ways that you may never know. Sometimes those little moments can make a difference decades later.
Your thinking is a twist on that of the toddler who hides behind his hands and thinks that Mommie cannot see him. Just because the victims of 9/11 were out of sight that does not mean that they didn’t have full and meaningful lives that are of great value.
It’s not just the Americans to blame though - it’s partly the modern risk-averse culture which both discourages private use of fireworks (not to the point of banning, at least not yet) and renders insurance prohibitively expensive for local public displays; and of course no-one would send out their pre-adolescents to beg money from strangers in the street, still less can they spend the proceeds on cheap fireworks. We have had our own Hallowe’en traditions for years, but the whole trick-or-treat thing was something I never really noticed until the 1980s.
@Captain Carrot: Hold down Alt, type 0233, release Alt: é.
Or, quicker by about 1 mllisecond, hold down ALT while typing 130.
A lot of other people have made the same points I was going to, some better. But I don’t comprehend how Wee Bairn can’t comprehend why a tragedy in my own backyard affects me far more than some royalty across the world.
Whatever Diana was or wasn’t she is dead. Let her rest in peace. There are new people now to worry about.
And fame does not equal importance. Birth does not equal importance. You seem to be arguing that because you and however many others think she’s important, I must also. I don’t agree.
I went looking through the page Zoe linked to. Here are a few people. Are these people unimportant?
Alona Abraham
Age: 30
Place of Residence: Ashdod, Israel
Location on 9/11: Aircraft, Flight 175
Occupation: Applied Materials, Industrial Engineer
Joseph Agnello
Age: 35
Place of Residence: , NY
Location on 9/11: WTC
Occupation: FDNY, Ladder Company 118, Firefighter
Christopher C. Amoroso
Age: 29
Place of Residence: Staten Island, NY
Location on 9/11: One WTC
Occupation: Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, Police Officer
Lynn E. Angell
Age: 52
Place of Residence: Pasadena, CA
Location on 9/11: Aircraft, Flight 11
Occupation: Hillsides School, Volunteer Librarian
That’s just a handful from the first page. How can you say these people were less - or more - important than Diana?
And let me add one more thing. Wasn’t Diana’s death almost directly caused by all of the people hounding her? I find the whole thing disgusting beyond belief.
Guy Fawkes day, of course, is done with tongue in cheek, but otherwise, I give up, I see my point is lost on most here, due to my inability to convey it properly.
But I still don’t see how the death of a person *you don’t know * in your town, even 3000 at a time, affects you more than someone you sort of know, like the Princess of your country. Scanning the obits I see Vanessa Lutz of Butte, Montana died yesterday of pneumonia, and no one cares who doesn’t know her. But if she died on 9/11, people would care? I don’t understand. Six firefighters died battling a blaze in Wilkes-Barre, PA Sunday, no one cares- but if they had died on 9/11, everyone cares?
I meant, I don’t see why students who don’t personally know any of the dead, or weren’t near any of the shooting, would still be wearing shirts or whatever at V Tech football games today about the event. I work in the Comcast building on the second floor. If there was a massacre of everyone on the fifth floor one day, none of whom I know, would I be wearing Comcast building T-shirts six months later or otherwise talking about the Comcast tragedy? Of course not. I don’t get why close proximity to a tragic event has people going overboard about it. I don’t get the “hey someone was shot by this water fountain, and I drank from the same fountain six weeks ago” thing either. If someone was shot at fifth and Main on Saturday, and you catch a bus there on Monday, you may momentarily think about it, but would you six months later?
Diana was “something” to many people before death- those in 9/11 were nothing to most before they died, so why are they something to you in death?
I’d hesitate to make that argument. She could flirt plenty with the paparazzi when she was of a mind to. It’s hard to go from that to “hounded to death” in a single bound.
I’ve always thought that the reason for the whole cult of Diana is the thousands of people living vacuous lives. They can’t be bothered to find something to give them a real sense of living, so they settle for a voyeuristic experience.
If they truly believed that her death was such a tragedy “who’ll look after the poor homeless AIDS babies in the mine fields now?” (love that line Miller) The answer is simple: Get up off your arse and do something about it yourself. Don’t just sit there wallowing in self pity about a self-publicising bint who died in a car crash.
Having said that, I have to admit the latest evidence from the inquest has confirmed my theory about the last thing to go through Diana’s mind at the time of the crash.
Dodi’s cock
I read a great letter in some paper a year or two ago. It was a follow-up to this guy’s first letter, explaining that he came home on Valentine’s day a couple of years ago to find a bouquet of flowers propped up against his door. He decided they must have been destined for someone else, so put them at the base of a nearby lamp post in the hope that they’d find their reightful owner. A few days later they had been joined by other bunches of flowers, teddy bears, etc.
He wrote to the paper the first time to relate this amusing story, and received in return several abusive letters about him “mocking people’s grief”.
That’s what the cult of Diana was all about, IMO.