Thiazi--I know you're not saying "kill all the darkies," but (ahh, you knew that was coming, dincha?) you do sound a bit like the Marketplace morning report, which whenever I mistakenly turn on the radio at that time goes something like:
"10 million killed by flood in Bangladesh; how will that affect your stock portfolio? and in travel news, Death and Destruction in Columbia mean fire-sale prices on Airline Tix!!!"
On the other hand, I do understand: part of what is going on here is that I grew up in the 1970s really feeling the threat of nuclear war. Ronald Fucking Reagan had his finger on the button, and he couldn't have told a tv from a toaster! That level of absurdity, to me, makes it difficult to get MORE upset about India/Pakistan, certainly, than I am about Bush, Baby's, flouting of International Arms Treaties and flippant use of the term "cold war relics."
And at Chernobyl itself the death toll is No Joke; the place is dead and deadly, still.
And for the second time I'll suggest that everyone read this article by Arundahti Roy
Here's a quotation: "My friends and I discuss Prophecy, the film of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the dead bodies choking the river, the living stripped of their skin and hair, we remember especially the man who just melted into the steps of the building and we imagine ourselves like that, as stains on staircases.
My husband's writing a book about trees. He has a section on how figs are pollinated, each fig by its own specialized fig wasp. There are nearly 1,000 different species of fig wasps. All the fig wasps will be nuked, and my husband and his book. A dear friend, who is an activist in the anti-dam movement in the Narmanda Valley, is on indefinite hunger strike. Today is the twelfth day of her fast. She and the others fasting with her are weakening quickly. They are protesting because the government is bulldozing schools, felling forests, uprooting handpumps, forcing people from their villages. What an act of faith and hope. But to a government comfortable with the notion of a wasted world, what's a wasted value? Terrorists have the power to trigger a nuclear war. Non-violence is treated with contempt. Displacement, dispossession, starvation, poverty, disease, these are all just funny comic strip items now. Meanwhile, emissaries of the coalition against terror come and go preaching restraint. Tony Blair arrives to preach peace - and on the side, to sell weapons to both India and Pakistan."
Those fig wasps are a big thing for me. An Arundahti Roy's a big thing for me. |
