If we are capable of thinking beyond ourselves, one cannot help but be depressed about the state of the world. No matter where one turns, disasters seem to be happening all around us. Fires are raging in the southwest. Droughts are killing the crops on which our lives depend. Tornadoes rip towns asunder. Landslides bury whole cities. Floods wash away homes and the people that lived in them. New viruses appear for which there is no treatment and the mortality rate approaches 90%. Global warming is melting the polar icecaps and Antarctica is shrinking at a rate that will raise sea levels an astounding four feet in the coming century. And those are just a few of the natural disasters about which we hear every day. There are those who would say that the Final Destruction of Armageddon is just desserts of the way we have lived our lives. For me, I am not gifted with such foresight and I hope those doomsayers are wrong.
As if the natural disasters weren’t enough to discourage us, we have an equally sobering list of things we observe that are result of human activity. Is there a nation on the planet that isn’t suffering under burdens of civilization? The entire continent of Africa seems bent on self-destruction. Millions upon millions have died violently where evidence would suggest that humans first walked upright and earned the sobriquet of Homo sapiens, which means “knowing man.” More than a hundred thousand years later, it seems there is much left for us to know. Perhaps a more fitting name for our species would be Homo violensis.
Nigeria, a land of gentle people, has been co-opted by the Boka Haram, which can be translated as “Western education is sin.” Will the hundreds of young girls in their grasp be saved? Who can say? In Iraq the Sunni and the Shiite continue to blow innocent people to smithereens on a nearly daily basis. Not to be outdone in killing the Taliban and al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan continue to live by a creed that no rational person can accept. The Ukraine and Russia are teetering on the brink of their own disaster. Then there is Somalia and Sudan, Rwanda and the Congo, Israel and the Palestinians, Syria and the rebels; the list is endless.
The United States can claim no exemption from violence, although we seem to be more willing to put a personal stamp on it rather than the mass murders in other countries. With alarming frequency a deranged person launches out on a killing spree. The NRA, for all the blinders they wear, is right: gun control will not stop these types of killing. As we have seen in our own community, psychosis creates its own rules that are too frequently unrecognized or untreated. When loosed upon the unsuspecting public, the news coverage given it inspires copycat behavior in others. The shootings are UC-Santa Barbara this past week end leave no doubt of that; the alleged killer boasted before the event that his actions would surpass the horror of Virginia Tech.
What reaction can we have to all these things? They are all so common place it is easy to become inured to the tragedy of it all. When we are saturated with information slipping into complacency is almost the default setting, followed by the thought that it doesn’t directly affect us.
Are all these catastrophes increasing or does it just seem that way? I would suspect that this age is no worse than the past. These things have always been part of life; they may be more frequent because of the burgeoning population. But the difference is that now they are globally known in the blink of an eye because of instant communication. In times long lost, even terrible events took months, if not years, to become known around the world. Now, “going viral” does not apply to a disease but the speed with which information spreads.
The important messages are obvious: Just because they don’t affect us doesn’t excuse us from concern. We cannot let ourselves become anesthetized by the regularity of terrible things. John Donne said it well in “No Man Is an Island.” That’s a lesson we must not forget:
No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man’s death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
Devotions for Emergent Occasions (1624)
– Hayden Hollingsworth