Getting ready for the New Year

In many ways this Christmas sticks in your mind when disasters are spoken off.  The Mayan calendar ending  spanned a huge range of doomsday scenarios and it was quite disturbing the number of elderly relatives who confessed to being quite content if the world ended.  They obviously felt life had gone on long enough and going out with a bang and lots of company held a certain appeal.  Unfortunately, these turbulent times are nothing new. 

Imagine living through the World wars or even the Spanish flu, which alone wiped out 40 million.  My great grandmother lost two sons in one week from that Flu.  I cannot begin to imagine what that was like to endure.  With World War I fresh in the mind there must have been a feeling that the horror would never cease.  The young and the strongest, the flowers of each family mowed down with breath taking speed.  The Spanish flu took out those with strong immune systems and so it must have seemed as if the blood let, in those trenches was not enough. If ever you walk, as I did with a cousin, through the war graves in France the scale of such losses hits you.

As far as the eye can see there are graves and as you crest one hill more stretch out in yet another vista of never ending crosses to mark lost lives.  The real consequences of war, its horror hit home and we were silenced by the horrendous loss before us.  

Years later, I had a similar feeling in Auschwitz when visiting the camp with a friend, Pari.  We entered a huge barn like room with shoes of those killed in the camp. 

It felt as if one’s heart was being squeezed in a vice, tightening with the absolute horror of it.  As the train pulled out of that place, Pari and I sat opposite each other in a carriage, in silence.  I found myself rubbing at my chest as if trying to ease the physical pain that knotted there.

Who can forget the more recent disasters such as the Tsunami on Boxing Day 2004 that wiped out 227,898 lives in terrifying unexpected swiftness.  If someone had predicted these disasters we would not have grasped even the possibility that such things could occur.  Our brains would have rightly denied the forthcoming horrors as impossible, intolerable and unendurable.  But our disbelief does not prevent such tragedies happening. 

Likewise, the fact that such tragedies do occur, does not necessarily mean we learn from our mistakes.  Wars still occur with depressing frequency; even natural catastrophes that afflict the world fail to unite us in response.  Instead, a strange lethargy keeps us continuing with business as usual.  As if daily routines will soothe things.  It strikes me that knowing the future might not help.  In fact spelling out such disasters would not be meet or seemly.  Our perversity in not awakening to such tragedies, adapting, learning and changing is however, distressing.  There are lessons to be learned and such losses of life should instil in all of us an urgency for change. 

If nations can endure such horror when we rise up to war, we must wage peace instead.  When humanity is facing such natural calamities and disasters, the need to be a world united in the race to save lives becomes achingly apparent.  These are lessons none of us can afford to forget.