Friday, January 07, 2005
When you're up to your a***hole in alligators, it's hard to remember that you only came here to drain the swamp.
The title of this, my first entry, is something a truly good man once said to me and a group of colleagues during a (professionally) stressful period. I presume he got it from another magus back along the line. It's about perspective...
Remember that film of the earth taken by the orbiting Apollo astronauts, the beautiful blue giant sphere turning gently and silently through space? Remember how benign the planet looked? How very, very huge? Hold that thought for a moment.
A lot of people died unexpectedly at the end of last month - at the end of last year. The toll is rising still, but at the moment it seems around one hundred and fifty thousand people died in the Indian ocean earthquake and wave disaster. That's a lot of people, isn't it? The orphaned, homeless and hungry are millions more. It's so many, spread over such a wide area, that by now the whole world is cast in the role of either victim or saviour. In my small city, far way in the other hemisphere of our giant blue planet, checkout girls and schoolboys, professors and prostitutes alike stood yesterday for three minutes of commemorative silence. That's two minutes more than they give the dead of two world wars each November 11th, and the dead of two world wars number more than one hundred and fifty thousand.
Fifty thousand and some Americans died in Vietnam. Who knows how many Vietnamese? In Rwanda the toll was in the millions. In Stalin's mania? In Mao's? In Pol Pot's? In Saddam's? In the Congo the count is hundreds of thousands and rising still. But this is all war and tyranny rather that an act of God, so is the tsunami somehow differently disastrous, differently shocking? Is it somehow even more activating, more guilt inducing than other disasters, other earthquakes, other famines? If so, why? Is it mere timing or suddenness? Is it because we, or people we know, go on holiday to Thailand but not to Ethiopia, or because we play cricket against Sri Lanka and India but not against Sudan or Palestine? I don't know.
I do know that if you call to mind that image from the space-race, that slowly turning beautiful blue and gigantic globe that is our planet, and look at its vastness while you imagine the sudden deaths of one hundred and fifty thousand of the six thousand million people living unseen beneath your awed gaze, the whole disaster seems somehow different to the way it seems on the BBC News. It's as if, in a blink, the population of Exeter had disappeared in an imperceptible puff of ether, somewhere beneath the vast swirling clouds that you see from your space ship. This tiny event would be unnoticed, silent and utterly unmemorable.
It's just a thought.........
Remember that film of the earth taken by the orbiting Apollo astronauts, the beautiful blue giant sphere turning gently and silently through space? Remember how benign the planet looked? How very, very huge? Hold that thought for a moment.
A lot of people died unexpectedly at the end of last month - at the end of last year. The toll is rising still, but at the moment it seems around one hundred and fifty thousand people died in the Indian ocean earthquake and wave disaster. That's a lot of people, isn't it? The orphaned, homeless and hungry are millions more. It's so many, spread over such a wide area, that by now the whole world is cast in the role of either victim or saviour. In my small city, far way in the other hemisphere of our giant blue planet, checkout girls and schoolboys, professors and prostitutes alike stood yesterday for three minutes of commemorative silence. That's two minutes more than they give the dead of two world wars each November 11th, and the dead of two world wars number more than one hundred and fifty thousand.
Fifty thousand and some Americans died in Vietnam. Who knows how many Vietnamese? In Rwanda the toll was in the millions. In Stalin's mania? In Mao's? In Pol Pot's? In Saddam's? In the Congo the count is hundreds of thousands and rising still. But this is all war and tyranny rather that an act of God, so is the tsunami somehow differently disastrous, differently shocking? Is it somehow even more activating, more guilt inducing than other disasters, other earthquakes, other famines? If so, why? Is it mere timing or suddenness? Is it because we, or people we know, go on holiday to Thailand but not to Ethiopia, or because we play cricket against Sri Lanka and India but not against Sudan or Palestine? I don't know.
I do know that if you call to mind that image from the space-race, that slowly turning beautiful blue and gigantic globe that is our planet, and look at its vastness while you imagine the sudden deaths of one hundred and fifty thousand of the six thousand million people living unseen beneath your awed gaze, the whole disaster seems somehow different to the way it seems on the BBC News. It's as if, in a blink, the population of Exeter had disappeared in an imperceptible puff of ether, somewhere beneath the vast swirling clouds that you see from your space ship. This tiny event would be unnoticed, silent and utterly unmemorable.
It's just a thought.........
