What Do We Do with the Tragedies? 

For the last few days, I've been pondering this question.  I'm a writer, and writers write, but today I could not until I decided to write this on the website.  The rest of the day, I did little things around my apartment, and decided this was the day to plant - long overdue - the tulip and daffodil bulbs I bought in November.

There's something about turning to green and growing things when the chips are down and the view is less than what you'd want. 

I was not, of course, personally affected by the tragedy in Haiti. I have no one there.  I've never been there myself.  But the scale of the tragedy set something off inside me akin to my response to war, any war. 

When I read Pat Robertson's ugly and inhuman response to the tragedy, I felt about the same as I felt toward Lyndon Johnson during the Vietnam war.  I have just finished the latest draft of my Vietnam novel, so that war is very much on my mind and so are the similarities to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

But beyond that, I began to think about where we humans are on the cosmic scale.  Not very big, not very important.  And yet, our hubris makes us feel much bigger, much more in control of - well, just about everything.  Then I read a line in the New York Times this evening by a geologist quoting historian Will Durant to the effect that everything is at the whim of geology and it can change without notice.  Indeed.

I'm always put off by articles that speak of the fury of Mother Nature or in some other way put human intent and emotions on nature.  Nature is just nature.  It is we humans who put intent and emotion into the picture.  We stand shaking our fists at the sky railing and raging against what's happening, but nature has no intent - ill or otherwise. 

I think we humans are fooled by the accident of being given the ability to reason, for better or for worse. It is this ability that's taken us to a lot of dark places in the name of religion, politics, big business and well, you can name more yourself. 

We think, therefore we are.  But we hardly ever think about WHO or WHAT we are.  Oh, sure, the hundred thousand self-help books explain the superficial qualities, but the deeper thinking has to come from inside ourselves.  I'm not sure we even really know how to begin.  

As a wise friend wrote to me today, perhaps the best we can do is to be kind to each other, be polite, not hold grudges and give others the room they deserve.  Something along that line sounds good to me.