Symbolism and the Irony of Synchronicity
Shed a tear, make that a fountain of tears for all those poor people in the U.S. Gulf States who have suffered the aftermath of a ferocious hurricane named Katrina. The world is such a small place; a mere few days after Katrina came roaring ashore in Louisiana she visited us here in Ottawa, so far away. She wrought no damage here, her dreadful winds abated, but left only torrents of rain, and at this time of year we don't mind rain at all. What Katrina did in southern Ontario was help our parched late summer earth along toward a felicitous fall soon to come. What Katrina did in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama was murder and mayhem. But for a little jog in geography, much as one used to muse: there, but for the grace of god go I.
Shed a tear, shed a river of tears for over seven hundred lost lives; women, children and the elderly; pious pilgrims whom the dread of terrorists in their midst drove to the point of death. Died in the crush of panicked human bodies, died in the River Tigris when the great host of pilgrims of which they were part and parcel, panicked to flee the onslaught of terrorists suspected to be in their midst, and in the process crushed the most vulnerable among themselves to death, and in the process sending scores of others over the bridge into the river there to meet their death. What dreadful irony, the majority Shiite population of Baghdad who under years of oppression by the minority Sunnis and their champion, Saddam Hussein, were forbidden to celebrate the anniversary of the most revered of their holy days. Now, after the autocratic ruler was deposed and they at long last were able to congregate and celebrate, on their approach to their historical Shiite mosque the event gave way under the impossible stress of human fear.
Lake Ponchartrain, the Mississippi river, they both witnessed and assisted in the murderous assault on the land masses containing them, willing helpmeets to Katrina. The Tigris of ancient fabled memory, an unwitting but oblinglyly-accepting repository in this latest matter of history gone awry. Continents apart, cultures as disparate as humanly possible, mutual histories of only recent memory, but the connection is there.
So why would a country as resplendent in natural wealth, in history, in moral and ethical imperative bring itself alongside the brink of bankruptcy both moral and virtual to beggar another country so far from its shores, so distant from its ethos? This unpopularly-elected president, this king of all he surveys, this prototypical ugly American, this shoulder-chipped Texan willed it to be, did he? Chagrined by his self-perceived insult to his Pappy, the then-president whom good common sense instructed to stop short, with his countless troops and the supporting armies of his western and eastern compatriots, of invading Baghdad? The ignominy of a bad, baad man like Saddam Hussein boasting that he and his armies had run the UN-sanctioned collective troops out of Iraq? An insult not to be borne, a time-biding rectification?
This shallow man, who has hoisted his religion upon a deeper State for whom deliberate separation of Church and State has given Democracy its truer meaning, will have his way and there you have it. It is not his children who die in prosecuting his war on an untenable hubris belonging to another, but abiding also in him. He has no problems besmirching the values of distraught mothers over their children's untimely deaths. This man much beloved by his oil-rich cronies, who himself owes so much of what he holds dear to this very same fuel of growth, so prized among the developed, developing, under-developed countries of the world, all striving to obtain as much as they can of the precious substance, the key to growth and the furtherance of technological advance. Whatever the cost.
Were a portion of the immense funds fuelling this peacekeeping, democratizing war have been earmarked to his own country's development, to the support of the indigent, the growing population of those living under the poverty line in the United States (now roughly 150% of the population of Canada in numbers), a health care infrastructure which favours those who have, not to mention a reasonably ecological assessment and development of a technological system which might have spared the population of the U.S. Gulf States (what irony in that "Gulf States") from the predictable depredations of a category 5 storm. Owing to global warming, which the United States officially resents and rejects the presence of, these storms will become more frequent, more ferocious, and what then of vulnerable coastal communities?
Shed a tear for these countless poor victims of catastrophies, brought on by nature unrestrained, and those manufactured by unrestrained man. Shed a tear for this rudderless world. Shed a tear for humankind that might have been, but is unable to be more than it is. Shed a tear for the supine acceptance of mediocrity. Welcome failure.
posted by Pieface @ Thursday, September 01, 2005
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