Registered: Jan 2001
Location: anywhere but here
Posts: 4420

This is a subject that was first brought to my attention by an English comedian called Eddie Izzard. He was doing a sketch where he mentioned how at a certain point the human comprehension for dealing with death dissappears. If one person dies, then its sad. If two people die, then its terrible. Ten people die its a tragedy. One hundred people a catastrophe. One hundred thousand people die then is a disaster. But how does one differentiate with the levels of grief?

For instance i find it hard to comprehend the 9/11 event. I never saw the WTC IRL so all i have for comparison purposes are the pictures i have of it, and the frames of reference i gathered from visiting NYC last winter. Now some 2,000 people died there, and we have a trememdous amount of imagery and grief from that event. Yet over 200,000 died at Hiroshima. Do we ever really deal with these things?

As humans our tolerence and capacity for death is quite limited. At a certain point it just becomes a number. We become numb. We have no reaction to it. Is it only when its personal that loss of life affect us? Or is it easier to dal with if we treat it just like we do any other facts.

What do you think?

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Registered: Feb 2001
Location: Boston
Posts: 6561

I remember finding out that I did not know a single person who died in the WTC, and yet it still hit me hard. The reality of the situation was taking over. However, in most instances I do not think most people would truly grieve and mourn over death that does not directly relate to them. And how could we? Every single day people die. It is a part of living. Most significant events in life are passed over unless it directly relates to you, otherwise I do not think any of us would get a single thing done in life. We would spend all day acknowledging life and not living it.

That brings us to the personal level. With anything unwanted in life, a person has to either learn to live with it or let it consume them. "Moving on" is another way of learning to live with it. Those thoughts will occassionally creep up on us, memories pushed down because they are the past, and when they do it is another time to learn to live with it. People snap and lose it when they cannot figure out how to live with it, or they give up.

With anything, it is always best to live through the experience of moving on with your life. I know that sounds weird, and some people do not do that. They never move on and become stuck. There is no point in that; just go enjoy the life you have, learn from it, experience it, and do the best you can. That's all.

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Registered: Jan 2001
Location: anywhere but here
Posts: 4420

many people still find it difficult to accept what happened on 9/11. it affected me but i can't say that i truly understand it, i cant deal with the notion of death on such a grand scale. i suspect that people neve deal with such an event, they only move on. They stick the event in a small box and shove it to a corner of the mind where it wont interfere with living.

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Registered: Oct 2001
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Posts: 17889

All I know is that for about a week after the event, I would just suddenly start weeping at any given time and have to stop what I was doing and give it a sec. On the other hand, I realize that there are other frames of reference. I know some people celebrate the event, and I understand the reasons they do, even if I find them alien to me and abhorent. I have seen all the faces of death type vids with the guys being beheaded and whatnot, but I find them deeply disturbing and unhealthy. I recognize that on some level we're just meat, and that's what those images reinforce in many ways. But on another level it shows that suffering is very real, and it's going on every day in the most horrible ways all over the planet. I can't help but identify with the people in those images simply on a human level, and it makes me want to curl up in a little ball and cover my eyes. I don't think it's healthy to look at that stuff. I know I'm bein a fag about this, but I think that's what battlefields are for. They concentrate all of that human evil and suffering in a more or less controlled environment and give it ritual and drama and public sanction so that the participants know they're all in it together.



what utter bullshit I just wrote

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Registered: Apr 2001
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Posts: 16671

I was kind of jaded early I think, I feel a lot and in stereo.
Growing up being close to children that were horribly abused and mistreated, and the two foster brothers and a sister I had from other countries that had been tortured by their government for their father's misdeeds and risked their lives trying to flea the hell of their country, and other things I saw when I was young that made me in my opinion somewhat practical when dealing with tragedy...or as practical as one can be when dealing with such horrors and feeling so much.

I tend to become angry when people allow things to happen by making the same mistakes over and over whether its a needy mother forgiving the boyfriend who is abusing her kids over and over or turning a blind eye, to cultural relativists...funny what those two have in common in some cases.
I become angry, and I am a fighter and I don’t think I would have lived as long as I have if I weren’t even with a few bouts of self destructivness…but even then any suffering or abuse I endured by my own hand would not have been allowed by another’s.

For me, when thinking of sept 11 I look at what recently lead up to it…say the last 10 years. What this group did to us during that time and what we did about it…and the answer to that is little or nothing if you count effective action…some people would have had us sit idle or peruse the same failing policies even after sept 11…much like the girl who keeps going back to the guy who beats her ass cause he said it will be different this time and she believes him for the 10th time.

So, how do I deal with tragedy? It depends on the circumstances. Hiroshima? That’s a little more complicated for me because of the ugliness of that war, the number of innocents being killed by the side that we bombed and the potential of a war that lasted much much longer if we hadn’t. It could very well have been a horrible tragedy that was the lesser of a larger tragedy, and I think its only fair to consider what effect it had on the rest of the world and the possibility that that day sent a jolt of something through the world that brought with it a constructive realization or a hesitation to invoke the war machine.

It hasn’t been used again since wwII, Even I who wasn’t alive then ( when the bomb fell in Hiroshima) still feel sorrow over the event, but I think it isn’t very realistic to think I should feel the same impact about that than another tragedy even if lesser that happened when I was alive.

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taste the fucking rainbow

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Registered: Oct 2001
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Posts: 17889

I think you should read "Quartered Safe Out Here" Phorbie. A British soldier fighting in Burma really put a good perspective on the bomb for me. I think it's terrible that all those people died, and I don't second guess the decision on behalf of the Allied servicemen who were spared an invasion because of it.

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Registered: Apr 2003
Location: I cant say I buy this completely,
Posts: 2506

quote:

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Every single day people die. It is a part of living. Most significant events in life are passed over unless it directly relates to you, otherwise I do not think any of us would get a single thing done in life. We would spend all day acknowledging life and not living it.

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Registered: Jan 2002
Location: UK
Posts: 13002

One death is a tragedy. A million is a statistic - Stalin

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