(no subject)
This is from Raizin's (gorpyganu) journal. He doesn't know I read it, but I think most of what he writes is pretty genius. I recommend it.
For those of you who haven't been reading the news, there was a big earthquake in the Indian Ocean, massive flooding, and suddenly over 120,000 people are dead. Wow. So... how do you deal with something like that? So far, the strategy I've seen is to kind of ignore it. But it's not a shallow, let's change the subject ignoring, I have been seeing some heavy, deep-seated ignorance going on. It's hard to even aknowledge what's happening over there. After all, if we had a minute of silence for every casualty, we wouldn't talk for over ten days.
There comes a point where names turn into numbers. One person dying is a tragedy, but one hundred people dying is a statistic. I worked at my mom's store last week, counting inventory, adding up the prices of menorahs and yarmulkes, and reloading nytimes.com every couple hours these last few days, I got lost in the same way. Oh, are we at 100,000 now? That's a lot of mezuzzahs.
And we're still counting. We're still counting! Thousands and thousands and thousands. What are we counting to? What number are we going to get to that's going to make it all make sense? I feel like we're living in the year 1 BC counting down to the new year, anxiously waiting to see what happens. Well, last year was 2, and the year before that was 3... What are we waiting for? What happens at zero? Already the number is impossible to comprehend. Remember September 11? This is like fifty of those. No, I'm not kidding. Fifty September 11s. Only this time, there's no one to blame. Who's the bad guy here? Water? Nature? Earthquakes? Who can we start a war with? Who will pay for what happened?
What do we do now? Good God, what do we do now? Do we avoid beaches, do we duct tape the windows? Do we just reread the same articles on the internet over and over? "Wild animals seem to have escaped the Indian Ocean tsunami," says CNN.com, "adding weight to notions they possess a 'sixth sense' for disasters, experts said on Thursday." It's infuriating! 130,000? 134,000? Is that it? Can I say that? Or are there already more? How can you think about that many people at once? Is there enough room in the brain? Let's try.
Okay, let's start with my dad. That's one person. My dad is like, what, six foot two, three? He has a gray goatee and salt and pepper hair. His vision is incredibly lopsided, twenty-fifteen in one eye, twenty-five thousand in the other, but he refuses to wear glasses, because he says it makes him feel like he's in a fun house. He's also almost deaf in one ear. He has a bad back and has had gum surgery. He's a very good writer, but the kinds of things he writes are descriptions of software his company makes to try to sell it to different large coporations like Coca-Cola. He doesn't love his job, but now is not a good time for jobs all around, and he has two kids in private schools. He gets really upset if you're watching a movie with him and he doesn't think you're paying enough attention, like if you're reading or doing laundry at the same time, or something. That's probably where I get it from.
Okay, so that's one person, more or less. 134,000 times that.
My immediate family has four people in it, not including me, my extended family an additional eighteen, without various great uncles and second cousins, so let's just estimate and say another fifteen for them. So, that brings the total to thirty-seven. Thirty-seven.
About 1300 people go to Bard, so that's like one percent right there. If you add the 1700 people I went to high school with, we're now at about 3000. I spent four years at Gunn and by the time I leave Bard I'll have been there for four years, so let's just multiply the total by eight, even though that doesn't make a lot of sense. So, now we're estimating that I've known about 24000 people in the last eight years. Let's multiply that number by four, even though again that doesn't really make sense, and estimate that I've met about 100,000 people in my entire life. So, okay, now let's say I'm watching MTV Indonesia on the day after Christmas and all of a sudden everyone I've ever known is dead, and it's really terrible, but also it doesn't matter because I'm dead too. So that's it. That's the end of that. Everyone's dead. The house is destroyed, the crops are ruined, but really it doesn't matter because we're all dead.
Now, I don't really know anyone over there, but my family does sponsor a little girl in Indonesia who wants to be a doctor and whose favorite activities are "washing plates, taking water, sweeping, and washing clothes." She writes my little sister Amalia a letter every once in a while to tell us how she's doing, something like, "Sister Amalia, thank you for helping me to go to school. I am working very hard, but also it is fun. My mother tells me sometimes that while helping to clean the house I should not have so much fun and should have more work instead. -Maria." (It's never a very good translation)
I wonder if Maria's still alive, or when we'd even find out, but I'm not optimistic. How could she have survived? Everybody's dead, right? Everybody? Is that what the number is at now? Suddenly, everything's irrelevant. Election fraud in Ukraine? Oh, how quaint. Weren't those happier times? Scott Peterson's double homocide (single homocide if you happen to be pro-choice)? Who has time to care about that now?
And unlike other travesties, we're not even indirectly responsible for this disaster, because we bought oil, or bought diamonds, or we didn't write letters to our congressmen, and without a reason to feel guilty, most of us aren't quite sure how to react. So we plan new years parties and read gossip about celebrities. Because really, how can you even begin to deal with something so, so devastatingly sad?