A Time To Mourn

[NATO AIR]

I think we as Americans especially should read this, its a powerful look at the tragic events of this week and how we should look at them.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/01/o...Opinion/Editorials and Op-Ed/Op-Ed/Columnists

A Time to Mourn
By DAVID BROOKS

Published: January 1, 2005

I have this week's front pages arrayed on the desk around me. There's a picture of dead children lined up on a floor while a mother wails. There's a picture of a man on the beach holding his dead son's hand to his forehead. There are others, each as wrenching as the last.

Human beings have always told stories to explain deluges such as this. Most cultures have deep at their core a flood myth in which the great bulk of humanity is destroyed and a few are left to repopulate and repurify the human race. In most of these stories, God is meting out retribution, punishing those who have strayed from his path. The flood starts a new history, which will be on a higher plane than the old.

Nowadays we find these kinds of explanations repugnant. It is repugnant to imply that the people who suffer from natural disasters somehow deserve their fate. And yet for all the callousness of those tales, they did at least put human beings at the center of history.

In those old flood myths, things happened because human beings behaved in certain ways; their morality was tied to their destiny. Stories of a wrathful God implied that at least there was an active God, who had some plan for the human race. At the end of the tribulations there would be salvation.

If you listen to the discussion of the tsunami this past week, you receive the clear impression that the meaning of this event is that there is no meaning. Humans are not the universe's main concern. We're just gnats on the crust of the earth. The earth shrugs and 140,000 gnats die, victims of forces far larger and more permanent than themselves.

Most of the stories that were told and repeated this week were melodramas. One person freakishly survives while another perishes, and there is really no cause for one's good fortune or the other's bad. A baby survives by sitting on a mattress. Others are washed out to sea and then wash back bloated and dead. There is no human agency in these stories, just nature's awful lottery.

The nature we saw this week is different from the nature we tell ourselves about in the natural history museum, at the organic grocery store and on a weekend outing to the national park. This week nature seems amoral and viciously cruel. This week we're reminded that the word "wilderness" derives from the word for willful and uncontrollable.

This catastrophic, genocidal nature is a long way from the benign and rhythmic circle of life in "The Lion King." It's a long way from the naturalist theology of Thoreau's "Walden" or the writings of John Muir.

The naturalists hold up nature as the spiritual tonic to our vulgar modern world. They urge us to break down the barriers that alienate us from nature. Live simply and imbibe nature's wisdom. "Probably if our lives were more conformed to nature, we should not need to defend ourselves against her heats and colds, but find her our constant nurse and friend, as do plants and quadrupeds," Thoreau wrote.

Nature doesn't seem much like a nurse or friend this week, and when Thoreau goes on to celebrate the savage wildness of nature, he sounds, this week, like a boy who has seen a war movie and thinks he has experienced the glory of combat.

In short, this week images of something dark and unmerciful were thrust onto a culture that is by temperament upbeat and romantic.

In the newspaper essays and television commentaries reflecting upon it all, there would often be some awkward passage as the author tried to conclude with some easy uplift - a little bromide about how wonderfully we all rallied together, and how we are all connected by our common humanity in times of crisis.

The world's generosity has indeed been amazing, but sometimes we use our compassion as a self-enveloping fog to obscure our view of the abyss. Somehow it's wrong to turn this event into a good-news story so we can all feel warm this holiday season. It's wrong to turn it into a story about us, who gave, rather than about them, whose lives were ruined. It's certainly wrong to turn this into yet another petty political spat, as many tried, disgustingly, to do.

This is a moment to feel deeply bad, for the dead and for those of us who have no explanation.

 

[alias]

The world's generosity has indeed been amazing, but sometimes we use our compassion as a self-enveloping fog to obscure our view of the abyss. Somehow it's wrong to turn this event into a good-news story so we can all feel warm this holiday season.

It is wrong to make people feel bad when they have a sense of satisfaction that the world has responded generously in this great disaster. Just because one might feel good that the world has responded generously does not mean that the horror of what has happened escapes attention. Friends that I was with yesterday were excited that America had offered $350M, but that did not diminish our understanding of the magnitude of the devastation. It is ok for America to feel good about responding positively to the events in South Asia. Japan's offer of $500M made today is great news.

 

[NATO AIR]

It is wrong to make people feel bad when they have a sense of satisfaction that the world has responded generously in this great disaster. Just because one might feel good that the world has responded generously does not mean that the horror of what has happened escapes attention. Friends that I was with yesterday were excited that America had offered $350M, but that did not diminish our understanding of the magnitude of the devastation. It is ok for America to feel good about responding positively to the events in South Asia. Japan's offer of $500M made today is great news.

I disagree. There is to be no satisfaction in any of this. I've experienced this myself, I felt good for about 3 minutes after I donated to the American Red Cross on Amazon.com... now i'm back to feeling helpless, waiting for my carrier task force to get called upon and help. And I bet that if we get sent in the next few weeks, when we help, it will feel good for a while, but in the end, it will still feel crappy. In the end, all I can do is pray for the victims, the survivors and be grateful I'm a citizen of a nation that is very generous and caring (America), unlike others (the Arab states, China, North Korea, Burma), as I do my best to understand and comprehend the gravity of the devastation.

In the end, you feel more of a grim resolve than a satisfaction.

I'm glad you dissent though. Its nice to exchange views.

 

[Comrade]

I disagree. There is to be no satisfaction in any of this. I've experienced this myself, I felt good for about 3 minutes after I donated to the American Red Cross on Amazon.com...

Good for you NATO, I contributed here as well.

 

[ScreamingEagle]

The earth shrugs and 140,000 gnats die, victims of forces far larger and more permanent than themselves.

This catastrophe is still difficult to get your head wrapped around the immensity of it....

...the earth wobbled...

God bless the innocent victims.