Why a national day to mourn was worthwhile

Like some others, I wondered about the necessity for a national day of mourning. Were we not going over the top seeing as the rest of the EU seemed to be content with a three-minute silence?

I had particular sympathy for small businesses where profit margins are slim.

Also, the degree to which we mourn and show solidarity seems to depend on how much we identify with the victims. Thousands can die in countries remote from us culturally or geographically and we scarcely blink.

Yet even allowing for all that, I believe that last Friday was a worthwhile exercise, if only because it showed us how rare a day of rest and reflection has become in our culture. Naturally, it would be infinitely preferable if it did not take a tragedy of the proportions of September 11th to slow us down.

More than one parent remarked to me how rare it is to have an agenda-free day at home with children.

Since the national day of mourning was announced so late, and for such sombre reasons, it had nothing of the feeling of, say, a bank holiday.

It was one of the few occasions at any time during the year when heading to the shopping centre was not an option. Nor were there childcare problems, because in the main parents and children were free together. That too, has become rare, except for holiday times, which tend to be packed with activity.

When I was a child, after-school activities were practically non-existent. Today, middle-class children in particular spend endless hours being ferried to everything from ballet to rugby.

Yet in spite of being involved in far more activities and having access to computer games and television in a way unimaginable 15 years ago, their greatest complaint is often of boredom, which exasperated parents then try to alleviate.

However, many developmental psychologists say that boredom is good for children, because it forces them to use their own resources. It also allows them space to dream, to reflect. Children not only have the right but the need to be bone idle from time to time.

There were many articles written in the past weeks about what we could tell our children. Thanks to television, at earlier and earlier ages children become aware of the evil in the world. That knowledge can make them insecure and fearful.

The one buttress against that insecurity is to feel that there are adults in the world whose task is to protect and care for them. Such a feeling of security is hard to build when parents have very little time, when everything is rush and hurry.

Maybe we should think about what we tell or model for our children on a daily basis, not just when tragedy strikes. Lots of our children, my own included, are being reared in an atmosphere of frenetic activity, with parents who constantly moan about there not being enough hours in the day.

I am quite sure that I did not even know the word stress when I was his age, yet my eight-year-old uses it constantly.

My parents worked long hours on the family farm, yet there was also a definite rhythm to the day, which included closure of one activity to begin another.

There were times of year which were very busy, but there were other times when the workload slackened off.

With the advent of mobile phones and e-mail, work encroaches more and more into the family sphere. Sometimes we can fool ourselves. I work a great deal from home, but often it just means is that I am physically present but emotionally unavailable.

There is no particular beginning or end to the work day.

My children really resent the phone and always up the decibel level by several notches when I am on a business call, to the degree that I am convinced that I will receive a visit from social services one of these days to see what I am doing to them to make them scream so much.

Some commentators remarked on the Good Friday feeling to the national day of mourning. They were showing their age, because Good Friday is little different from any other day nowadays, particularly in the case of radio and television schedules.

The sensitive choice of music and programme items seen on the day of mourning used to be the norm on Good Friday, but no longer.

Shopping has often replaced church services as a family activity on Sunday.

This is all supposed to be healthy, the sign that we are moving to a multi-cultural pluralist society. I suspect that it is simply a sign that we are moving towards a less reflective and thoughtful society, because the Christian times of reflection are not being replaced by any secular equivalent.

In Britain, the Keep Sunday Special campaign was a coalition of everyone from religious interests to trade unions. Here, we did not even have such a campaign. We simply capitulated and Sunday became just another day.

We are the poorer as a result. The idea of Sabbath, even stripped of religious significance, meets a profound human need. We need time to absorb, to reflect, to integrate our lives, or else life becomes just a mad rush.

Interesting, though, that we still reach for religious services as a way to express solidarity, to acknowledge that even when we are helpless to do anything concrete that presence is still important.

Future generations may have less access to that kind of symbolic solidarity, simply because they have little exposure to such rituals. Watching teenagers at a funeral recently, I was struck by how they did not have a clue how to conduct themselves in a church.

Ironically, some of us will soon have more time for reflection than we would wish, because of job losses caused by the economic downturn. Work is such an integral part of human dignity, that no one would wish enforced idleness on anyone.

What we would all wish for is a sense of balance. The national day of mourning made many of us realise that that balance is sadly lacking from our lives.

bobrien@irish-times.ie