caerula's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- the band plays on In connection with the book I'm reading, and with a discussion that was going on on List, I've been thinking about disasters. I know, cheerful, huh? But what I've been thinking about is why they fascinate us so. On List, people have been saying how they sympathize with the loss of life, the idea of children lefy without parents, or they grieve for the senseless of things like Columbine, or the Challenger explosion. A lot of people have equated celebrity deaths, Diana and JFK Jr. and John Lennon, with this, but I think that's really a different subject. That's the tragic, early death of someone we identify with, whether as an idol, a hero, whatever. It's avoidable, it's tragic, and it's someone we are familiar with, so perhaps we feel it more deeply than the anonymous murders and drownings every day in the paper. We become immune to those, they happen all the time. Then suddenly we are jerked out of our complacency by the death of some much-loved public figure, and the press decendes, and we can't get away from it. If a princess who represents, to you, wealth and beauty and everything missing from your life, can die in a mangled car, what prevents that from happening to you? If the golden boy of Camelot can make a judgment call that kills him and two others, how can we trust our own judgment? If someone the public thinks must have everything shots himself in the head, what is stopping us from ending our miserable little lives? Disasters, though, are different. I think. Perhaps it's something to do with sheer numbers, but I think it cannot be just that. The riverboat Sultana sank on the Mississippi in 1865 and killed 1,547 people, many former Union POWs returning home at the end of the war -- a greater loss of life than the Titanic, 50 years later. In 1985, toxic gas seeped from the Union Carbide insecticide plant in Bhopal, India, and 2000 people died. A hurricane and subsequently flooding killed between 6000 and 7000 people in Galveston in 1900. But we all know about the logpile collapse at Texas A&M, about the school shootings, TWA flight 800, the Chicago fire -- relatively minor, in terms of casualties, although of course not minor to those who lost someone. Maybe it's the irony, the what ifs. What if someone had seen the iceberg in time to turn, what if the Californian had responded to the SOS? What if the west doors on the 9th floor of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory weren't locked? What if Hitler's mother had had an abortion? Or, maybe, it's the knowledge of the details, which we now are bombarded with via tv and newspapers; the heartwrenching details like the fireman holding the little girl in Oklahoma City, the students running out of Columbine High School with their hands on their heads, So what is it? I can't answer for everyone, but I can tell you what I think (which of course is the function of this journal in the first place). I think they are all symbols. I think they touch us so deeply not as the real thing, as the actual 1500 people drowned, 200 burned to death, 17 shot. It what they represent to us: our own tenous place on the planet, our slipping grasp on life, our fear of annihilation. We are all going down, sliding down the deck grasping desperately at handholds, and those handholds are the what ifs. This time someone will see the iceberg in time, the rescue ship will come, the door will be unlocked, the gun will misfire, the engines were tuned up, the ice on the wings was noticed, the bomb is a dud, the madman was caught. Some of us grasp futilely at those what ifs. Some of us dive off, knowing it's too late for what ifs. And some of us stay on board, reassuring the others, playing with the band. 9:23 a.m. - 2001-07-10 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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