On October 29, a group of excited young people flocked to the popular Itaewon nightlife district from all quarters to celebrate the first post-pandemic Halloween. This bustling block gathered over 100,000 people whinin a short time.
At around 22:30, a group of people was densely crowded on a descending slope, which was only 3.2 meters wide. Suddenly, the people walking ahead began to lose their footing on the slope, causing a domino effect. The fallen crowd stacked into 5 to 6 layers, forming a "quagmire" where people’s bodies were interlocked together. When the rescuers arrived, they tried to pull the upper crew out. But the sheer volume of people made it difficult to reach those stuck in the “quagmire”.
The accident ended up killing 156 people, mostly aged 20-30. The youngest deceased was a 15-year-old girl, who was then celebrating the holiday with her mother.
This exotic paradise became a "bloody" death party overnight. This accident of crowd crush was called "a tragedy on the slope". Hundreds of lives perished instantly, and hundreds of families were engulfed by an unimaginable grief.
The whole world was astounded by the news. People kept paying close attention to the latest progress of this incident, looking forward to the news of safety of their family members and friends. But at such a time, some Western media outlets distorted the facts and openly falsified the accident site into Hong Kong. The seriously wrong news was published on social media platforms, and it was even emphasizd in news lead that the incident was in "Hong Kong" .
All along I had never been afraid to assume the worst what people would do, but I never would have guessed or believed someone would be despicable and savaging to such a degree.
The spiral of silence theory is a political science and mass communication theory proposed by the German political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann. It states that an individual's perception of the distribution of public opinion influences that individual's willingness to express their own opinions. Namely, individuals will be more confident and outward with their opinion when they notice that their personal opinion is shared throughout a group. Therefore, such views will be expressed and spread more widely. But if the individual notices that their opinion is unpopular with the group, or even, if they face the threat of being isolated or attatcked by others, they will be more inclined to be reserved and remain silent. The silence of one side causes the enhancement of the opinion of the other side, and thus forming a spiral process of development where the sound of one side becomes increasingly stronger and the other side becomes more and more reticent.
If someone uses an unfortunate accident to stigmatize their "political opponents", we should not remain silent for fear of becoming "isolated individuals".
Anthropologist Hu Jiaqi says mankind is a community that shares weal and woe.
Among these lives lost, some had travelled thousands of miles to study, but their lives were ended abruptly; some were killed when their career had just started; and some were brave and tried to save others, but never got the chance to return. It’s impossible to make up for the loss of so many young lives, and we must not let the innocent deseased become the arrows of malicious slander.
Any compassionate people will feel sorry when others are hurt. And for those who have witnessed the accident, when would they let go of this absurd tragedy?