Note On Swine Flu

At present The Marginal has no plans to carry posts relating to the Swine Flu crisis. However, this may change as the crisis deepens and it becomes apparent what the longer-term issues are and how the crisis is affecting society. In the meantime,if you wish to follow events more closely please visit Fragmentary World (link on sidebar) where the day to day developments will be covered and links tofurther information provided.

A Quick Announcement

“Walls – What are they good for?”

Regular readers of The Marginal may be interested in a ‘conversation’ taking place on one of our related sites, Fragmentary World. The subject of the conversation is “Walls – What are they good for?” We may pick up some of the themes this provocative question will undoubtedly unearth at a later date but, to give you an idea ofthe kindof issues which they hope to explore, here’s an extract from the post launching the conversation.

 ”This year marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the now infamous Berlin Wall and, with it, the eventual collapse of Soviet Communism. Here at FW we decided to begin a ‘conversation’ about the idea of ‘Wall’. What is a wall, why are we obsessed by them, is the wall merely an outward, physical expression of what happens within us, both individually and collectively? ” (full post ‘Join the Conversation’ at Fragmentary World)

 

THE MARGINAL IS CHANGING

I’m currently redeveloping thesite so that it will eventually be more suited to both readers and authors’ needs. You may encounter changes in colour and format during the next few weeks which will only be temporary – there isn’t any other way to test these things out using an application such as wordpress, please be patient and leave any suggestions, comments or reports of problems in the comments box on this post. Hopefully we’ll get through this quite quickly with minimal gliches. If It’s possible to avoid changing the site URL I’ll do so!

Thanks for your understanding and patience,
dezertrat

Zimbabwe Poll

A short exercise in ‘Internet Democracy’

Recent reports from inside Zimbabwe suggest the country is now struggling against unbelievably tough odds to pull itself out of the morass created by Robert Mugabe and his henchmen. At the time of the agreement between Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) it seemed the cautious potimism expressed by ‘economically strong’ governments, such as Britain and the US, would soon be followed by much needed ‘hard cash’ and material assistance in order to help the process of rebuilding. However, with the arrival of deepening recession, and some confusion about who is really in control in Zimbabwe, this willingness to act seems to have evapourated as quickly as mist under the African sun!

Please watch the film here and see report here and complete the poll below. Thank you for your help

Past Events, Present Realities

Looking Back – The Painful Past

Today marks the 20th anniversary, if ndeed such a word is appropriate, of the worst disaster in British sporting history. At approximately 3.06m on April 15th, 1989, the semi-final of the F.A. Cup featuring Liverpool and Nottingham Forest was abandoned after serious crowd cogestion in the Liverpool end of Hillsborough Stadium, Sheffield, led to the deaths of 96 football supporters, some as young as 15 years old. I remember the occasion well, even though Iwas not present myself due to personal circumstances, because my parents and several other members of my family, togerher with friends whom we normally attended matches with, were present and witnessed the tragic event first-hand. Some were affected worse than others and one of our friends has never been to a football ground again since.

Yesterday I listened to a radio programme commemorating the tragedy and was struck by how, even 20 years later, the pain and anger, all too present immediately after the event, was still extremely obvious in survivors, families of the victims, and players who were at the club at this time. The tragedy has become eshrined in the club’s history and a service of rememberance/commemoration will be held at the club’s ground later today. There has never been an official recognition of the poor standard of policing at the game despite a public enquiry by Lord Taylor, the leading Judge in the land at the time, which completely exhonorated the fans’ behaviour on te day and laid the blame or the disaster firmly at the door of South Yorkshire Police – following the event the fans behaviour had been condemned by ‘the Press’ with ‘The Sun’ newspaper taking the lead. The sense of injustice is still palpable and makes it difficult for bereaved families and survivors to come to terms with what happened.

Indifference

As I have reflected on the events of 20 years ago, and indeed the events of the last nine days in L’Aquilla, the importance of such events in shaping people’s whole lives has hit home. It got me thinking along several threads at once, not all of which I wish to pursue at present. It seems that tragic events are particularly significant, only very rarely do we commemorate happy events publicly and regularly, in that their rememberance brings the sense of loss crashing into our lives again. This rememberance, this faculty of memory, which brings to mind not only the fact of the event but also the feeling, the very essence of it, not only ‘what took place’ but ‘what took place for us’. If this is the case then two things follow: firstly, the extent to which we were involved, wer we present, did we know anyone who was present/killed/survived, assumes huge importance for our ability to remember and our willingness to be reminded, and also our ability/willingness to forget.

Secondly, the degree to which we involved ourselves, how much we read about, watched on TV, investigated, or chose to ignore the event, has equally huge consequences for our memories but also for our ability/willingness to act in support of those who were unavoidably involved. It may well be that indifference to suffering is the chief cause of paralysis in times of crisis. This was almost certainly true in that other great crisis which was remembered this last week – the Rwandan genocide, which occurred 15 years ago this month while the ‘civilized world’ argued over the definition of a word and made plans to evacuate its people!

‘Lenses’

So do these past events, remembeed at regular intervals to a greater or lesser degree, teach us anthing at all? For it seems, if what we sais earlier is correct, that they can only teach us if we are willing to be taught, and that willingness is somehow dependent on our willingness to engage with tragedy and crisis when it occurs or when we become aware of the enormity of what has/is taking place. Somehow, it seems, we shape our view of present realities by the lenses (significant events) we choose to view it through. There is nothing new in what I am saying here; in fact it has a very fancy name, hermeneutics, and is basically the ’science’ of interpretation. Not every event has similar significance to everybody and it’s questionable whether or not there is an ‘agreed’ set of truly significant eents. But locally, the Hillsborough tragedy, or nationally, Rwanda or the present eqrthquake crisis in Italy, certain events can have a lasting effect on communities or nations and can ‘colour’ the way other events are seen and evaluated. This word ‘evaluated’ introduces a further concept, that of judgement. How does an individual, a government, or even a world body such as the United Nations, judge the significance of an event so as to make a responsible decision about what action to take. This is another huge subject which for now I am going to by-pass.

Looking at all of this together we could feel daunted at the prospect of ever ‘acting responsibly in a crisis’ again. But we could summarise this by saying that past events shape our perception of present realities; they do this in proportion to our engagement with the events and how we deal with the effects of the events through the healing work of mourning, forgiving, and forgetting (in the right way). Different events will have different significance for different people or groups of people, and they will interpret these events in accordance with their beliefs and what is at stake in the event. For example, those involved in the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S.A. in 1968 were traumatized by the shooting of Martin Luther King Jr because they had invested massively in supporting him as the figurehead of the movement – his murder raised huge questions about the viability of the movement without it’s leader ad about the philosophy of Nonviolence which he preached. Indeed it could be argued that the movement stalled and ultimately failed to achieve all it could have after this event.

Looking Ahead

With these thoughts in mind, what of L’Aquilla and the surrounding villages, devastated both materially and emotionally. As I’ve said before, the material things can be replaced and rebuilt but how do you rebuild a family that now has an empty bed where a child once slept? There will no doubt be an inquest, but I would b suprised if it proved at all conclusive. There will be recommendations, just as there were after the Hillsbrough tragedy, dealing with infrastructure and building regulations etc. but whether or not these are implemented and how quickly remains to be seen. All of this legal stuff will of course be secondary to those who formed the communities that lived there. Their livs will be forever impacted by this disaster and by the way others responded to their cry for help. I wonder what their view of justie and indeed of their fellow human beings will be like ten or twenty or fifty years from now. I’d like to close this pot by dedicating these words, known to football fans around the world but particularly to supporters of Liverpool, not only to the memory of the 96 fans who died atHillsborough but also to the families and friends of the 283 people kiled in the L’Aquilla earthquake on Monday April 6th, 2009.

When you walk through a s storm hold your head up high,

And don’t be afraid of the dark.

At the end of the storm is a golden sky,

And the sweet, silver song of a lark.

Walk on, through the wind, Walk on, through the rain;

Though your dreams be tossed and blown.

Walk on, walk on, with hope in your heart,

And you’ll never walk alone, You’ll never walk alone.

Humanity Laid Bare

What must it feel like to be caught up in a situation over which you have no control but rather you are being controlled by it? In fact, worse than that, you are being manipulated, constrained, limited in even the most basic of human needs. What if you are also struggling to even begin to come to terms with what is happening? What if your fundamental beliefs and view of the world have been shaken? What if you can’t see beyond the next day, you can’t see an end in sight and you have no hope? Then you would find yourself in a very similar situation to the thousands of survivors of last Monday’s earthquake in L’Aquilla who now live in tents instead of houses.

Powerlessness

There have been several different categories of power displayed in his last week. The unstoppable power of nature as the earthquake struck the city; political power as leaders struggled to regain control and organize; the power of the media and internet to make aware and inform; and the power of the selfless human response. All of these ‘powers’ have, whether knowingly or not, conspired to produce the situation described in negligable detail above. The combined effect of this is that every part of what makes us human has been exposed. Our fragility and ultimate mortality; our limitedness when faced with need on such a massive scale; our dependance on social structure and community; our capacity to begin again, to help without question, to give to another what we are not even sure of ourselves.

Some of these human characteristcs are positive, others are not. Those who have power have not always acted wisely this week and have exposed themselves to public ridicule even as they made light of the situation and totally failed to grasp the sheer enormity of the impact this earthquake will have on people’s lives. When yoou’ve lost everything that mattered to you, including your family or friends, the last thing you need to hear is a politician telling you to go to the beach! I am deeply suspicious that the people of L’Aquilla and the surrounding villages will not have much of a say in how the area is rebuilt if it’s left up to the politicians and private developers – but that will be a subject for a later date.

“Everybody prays..”

At the start of this piece I mentioned that even beliefs and views of the world have been shaken by what has happened. This isn’t that unusual in times of disaster but I wonder if it depends what you believe. Here’s a quote from one of the survivors which struck me as somewhat odd when I read it. (From the BBC European News page)

“Everybody prays…and yet Jesus Christ sends us an earthquake”

Before looking at this statement in a little more detail we need to consider that this statement was made at a very stressful time and that it more than likely does not represent the views of many of the survivors in this predominantly Roman Catholic country. However, whatever the religious beliefs of the one who made the statement and whatever the circumstances, it is an interesting statement for a number of reasons. First, the one making the statement makes a number of assumptions about prayer. these could be summed up perhaps by saying something like “we need to pray so that bad things don’t happen, and the more of us who are involved the more effective it will be.” This kind of approach to prayer has characterised the attitude of many religions over many centuries and at it’s core lies the thought that God or ‘the gods’ need to be pacified or they might become angry. So, by saying “everybody prays…and yet…” this person is essentially saying “we kept our side of the deal, what happened?”

Second, whoever made this statement believed some things about Jesus Christ: that he is alive, that he is God (otherwise why would you pray to him?), that he has the power and the willingness to ’send earthquakes’. This now introduces a further category of power, ‘divine power’ into the discussion. It would also, if we wanted it to, be the launch pad for a much larger discussion about ‘God, judgement and suffering’. Readers may be relieved to know that I have absolutely no intention of getting into such a discussion at this time! However, these understandings about Jesus are important as they are commonly found among many Christian churches and groups. They are based on a certain model of prayer, which could be summed up as a ’cause and effect’ model, and certain views about God’s intervention in the world and what motivates it. I would not be harsh enough to imply that this belief is only focussed around judgement and punishment as many people who believe that God is active in judgement also believe that God intervenes in miracles of healing for example.

The Man Jesus

At the begining of this post I described a situation which was not unlike that faced by Jesus immediately before his crucifixion. I don’t wish to make any huge theological points here, merely to point out the similarity of the situations. Having believed, haveing prayed, having been obedient, Jesus finds himself abandoned by all and finally, on the cross, apparently by God. Hanging there, close to death, naked and humiliated, all of his humanity is laid bare, there is no place to hide; he has become a public spectacle, loved by some scorned by a few, ut to most of the world’s population an object of complete ignorance and indifference. Such was also the case for the victims and survivors of the earthquake on Monday morning; their possessions scattered like so much garbage on the streets, many of them half-dressed and distressed they too became a public spectacle in their distress and misery as they desperately clung to their few belongings and waited for news of relatives and friends. Forensically examined by th world’s media they remain an object of public display, loved by some, scorned by some, but to most just another group of bedraggled survivors from yet another disaster. 

So we have the famous cry of dereliction which has been echoed by many who have faced trials and disasters throughout the ages. In it there is the question which always surfaces from deep in our subconscious; “what have I done to deserve this?”.  In the case of the earthquake victims the answer will undoubtedly be nothing, not for those who suffered.Thankfully the Easter story doesn’t end with the cross, as we know, just three days later God raises Jesus from the dead and this is the sign of hope. Again I will avoid theological disussion and simply work with the metaphor of resurrection.

The easter story, as told by Luke, continues with the narrative of the two men on the road to Emmaeus. As they walk they reflect on the hope, now obviously gon, they had put in Jesus as Messiah, when a third man, a stranger, comes alongside and begins to explain what has happened. Night is coming so they stop at the two men’s house to rest and eat. Over dinner it becomes immediately obvious to the two men that the stanger is Jesus who is clearly alive.  Why include this here?

No-one is saying there is going to be a mass resurrection of physical bodies; that would be heartless and cruel. But for the villages and city of L’Aquilla there will be a physical regeneration. Buildings will be rebuilt, roads remade, gas and electricity reconnected – but what of the survivors themselves? Who will remake them? Who will help the injured, the traumatized, the bereaved, the depressed, to readjust and find peace with themselves again. This is where that capacity of the human to begin, through individual and collective action, to recreate comes into its own. 

 The philosopher Hannah Arendt called this capacity “natality”, not in the sense of birth rate, but in the sense that with each new birth there is the potential of a new begining, something as yet unseen, which comes about by action (for Arendt ‘action’ is always political and is collective)* in the public realm. It’s my own belief that hope generates hope, that when someone who has hope comes alongside and helps, in very practical ways, another individual or group then hope is contagious. People who think they have power will not do this, they fail to realise that merely providing resources is not enough, one must provide humanity with humanity. this, after all, is the point of the Incarnation of Jesus, that he came as a human in order that we might know God, yes, but also that we might know what it means to be truly human.

*see “The Human Condition” by Hannah Arendt for further explanation

A Time to Mourn

 

L’Aquilla, Abruzzo, Central Italy, April 2009

283 Dead

1500 Injured

20,000 Homeless

These are the bare, brutal facts of what has been, and continues to be, a devastating week. With the funerals of 200 or so of the victims taking place on Good Friday (yesterday) there will be those who will now wish the whole matter closed, in their minds and emotions if not in reality, as if somehow the mass funeral with its attendant political and official dignitaries had sealed the matter and signalled the end of ‘offiial’ mourning. But surely this is never the case! In fact, especially for those invoved, the mourning period goes on for much longer and cannot merely be brushed aside because it becomes officially expedient, nor can it be dimissed as mere sentimentality or ‘emotionalism’.

I believe that mourning is a vital and necessary part of what it is to be human and that proper time needs to be allowed for this to take place. You may ask why, surely we need to move on and get back to our routine? there are a number of presuppositions built into such statements which we are probably not aware of because we have become so used to thinking this way.

Behind most of these type of comments lurks the thought of forward progress, of movement towards……. well if you try to pin down exactly what it is we’re all supposed to be moving towards then it really depends who you ask – this certainly isn’t the time or place to debate these theories but mast people have one of some sort or other. The bottom line with these thoughts of forward progress is that dwelling on the past is seen as a dangerous and harmful thing; this is especially true in two areas; personal life and major disasters. To be even more blunt we could put it like this; whatever slows us down, eiher individually or nationally, is not productive and of no use – therefore it/they should be pushed aside as quickly as possible to clear the way for the next step!

Another thought behind the rush to ‘move on’ frrom death is that death reminds us that we are fragile and temporary in this world. Many people do not like to be confronted with this fact – like reminders for unpaid bills reminders of mortality are often shoved to the back of our minds in the misguided hope that somehow we won’t have to face the final consequence of the humancondition. The notion of the indestrucability of humanity, popular in the 19th century with the beginings of modern medicine and the potential benefits of new technology (a set of categories which has never really gone away and is once again being trumpeted as the ‘way forward’) was cruelly exposed in the bloodbaths and genocides of the twentieth. However, despite the lessons of our recent past, we are still shocked when life is snatched away through natural disasters such as took place on Mnday in L’Aquilla. And this is why we need to mourn properly, because mourning has a function, a role, in the human existance.

So what is the point of mourning? It is this; mourning provides a space in which, both as individuals and as community, come to terms with our loss. This loss can be anything from breakdown of relationship to divorce to loss of a bodily function (such as sight or walking) through to death of a friend or family member or a community tragedy. The point is our bodies (here I make no differentiation between for example mind, emotions, physical body, spirit) demand the space to mourn, to readjust, come to terms with what has happened. If we don’t give ourselves, or are not given, this space in which to work out our grief we will pay a heavy price medically at some point in the future; if grief is not taken seriously it will catch up with us – I know this from personal experience. And this ‘working out’ may not meet with our approval when we see it happening in others but this is when we need to be truly human and support them as they go through the process – to try and shorten this process because we are uncomfortable with it is to risk greater damage and is ultimately an act of completely selfish motivation. So, this Easter weekend, my prayer is that the people of L’Aquilla will be given time to mourn, rebuilding and regeneration will surely come but for now we need to take a pause and allow love to do its work.

For everything there is a season,

and a time for every matter under heaven:

….a time to weep, and a time to laugh;

a time to mourn, and a time to dance;

                Ecclesiastes 3:1,4        

 

Anyone for Camping?

(I’ll write a more serious critique of Berlusconi’s ‘power’ in a while)

Can there ever have been a more thoughtless comment by a national leader at a time of crisis than that made by Silvio Berlusconi earlier today? If you haven’t already heard he was talking to a film crew at one of the tented villages around L’Aquilla when this comment passed his lips: “It’s like a weekend’s camping….” How heartless, how completely inappropriate, how politically opportunistic?

I have to say, as someone from a country with a history of Prime Ministerial blunders, I haven’t been impressed by Sr. Berlusconi in this crisis. The man seems so totally self-absorbed and ultra-conscious of his image; I always get the impression he’s playing toa larger audience – like one of those anoying people who looks over your shoulder and establiches eye-contact with somebody else while pretending tobe interested in you! I’m sure you’ve all had that experience, the feeling that the other isn’t really listening to anything you’re saying. Well, Berlusconi should have heard someof those survivors interviewed today as they almost unanimously spoke about his comment. I could summarise their comment like this: “If that’s what he thinks he should come and join us or perhaps he’d like to swap for a while, he can come here and we’ll go to his villa in Sardinia! It’s no time to be making jokes while people are still missing, he’s only thinking of himself.”

And so it went on in every interview, throughout the day. Which got me thinking, and I hope you canforgive my humour at his expense, can you spot the difference between these two pictures?

 

(I’ll write something more serious on Berlusconi’s ‘power’ in a while; please feel free to comment on anything on this page, thank you for taking the time to read)