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The Crown: Part Eighteen

By Michael Moriarty
web posted August 3, 2020

ABERFAN!

What can this be about?

Thursday, October 20th, 1966!

Ah!

Aberfan, Wales!

A Friday.

Lest we forget, a major, distinctively different, cultural corner of Great Britain!

Oh, my God!

An earthquake?!

Certainly looks like it!

Now, Aberfan’s citizens trying to dig their loved ones out from under the rubble and ruins!

Not an earthquake?!

Not, not entirely Mother Nature’s fault.

A creation of the coal mining industry collapses and. with the force of an earthquake, crashes into and buries countless numbers of children and their teachers.

When the tragedy is reported to the Queen, she refuses to visit the site.

“Why would I go?” she asks. “The Crown visits hospitals. Not the scenes of accidents!”

The mounting evidence of Queen Elizabeth’s utter insensitivity to her people and her obedience to old rules that increasingly look utterly inadequate?!

Hmmm…

My once, unswerving loyalty to this particularly devoted Christian Queen of England has been badly damaged.

More in this third series of The Crown has been altered by the creators than just the cast.

The much sadder truths about the Queen’s shortcomings are being accented. And at Aberfan?!

Mother Nature’s excessive rains are partly a cause for the disastrous collapse of the mines!

The design and maintenance of the coal mines themselves, however, are also responsible for the now, seemingly unending nightmare.

Increasingly responsible for the size of the collapse.

As Prime Minister Wilson anxiously responds to it, “Everything is political!”

So far?

60 bodies recovered.

An uncalled for moment of silence descends upon everything and everyone! The rising death toll seems to have demanded a profoundly shocking inability to say anything.

“BACK TO WORK, EVERYONE!” ends the previously frightening silence.

How many more have been killed by the possibly avoidable nightmare?!

Every whistle blown means another dead child pulled from the wreckage.

As much as a 150 more are still missing.

Most of them children.

As the news expands to other upper reaches of Royalty…and the additionally empowered, such as Prime Minister Wilson?! A silence as deafening as the unexpected one that fell so suddenly over almost all of Aberfan?!

Now falls over everything. ESR

Michael Moriarty is a Golden Globe and Emmy Award-winning actor who starred in the landmark television series Law and Order from 1990 to 1994. His recent film and TV credits include The Yellow Wallpaper, 12 Hours to Live, Santa Baby and Deadly Skies. Contact Michael at rainbowfamily2008@shaw.ca. He can be found on Twitter at https://twitter.com/@MGMoriarty

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