Blossoms and buds
have opened on schedule this spring while my eyes, and maybe yours, too, have
been opening once again to the fact that all of us are vulnerable not only to natural
calamity but also to the effects of geopolitics and their impact on so-called
human nature. The news of late has highlighted
the plight of Third World people in exodus, headed for Europe, great numbers of
whom have drowned at sea. Then in late
April a major earthquake in the Himalayas gained instant attention. To our credit as a species, human beings can
be dedicatedly altruistic. I am
referring to the Italian rescue missions operating daily in the Mediterranean,
scooping foreigners out of the soup, bringing them ashore and offering them temporary
shelter and food. I am also thinking of
all those rescue workers and trained dogs now landing on the single runway of
the airport in Kathmandu, the capital city of Nepal, which may be the world's poorest
nation (and reputedly very corrupt). For
days following the 7.8 event on the Richter, foreign teams have been pulling
survivors and corpses out of the rubble as stylized Nepalese Buddha eyes
painted on cracked temple walls continue to gaze with equanimity. "All is suffering," the Awakened
One said. Whatever exists on the material
plane is bound to disappear, a truth which, if not accepted, will make us
suffer doubly. Today news reports are flooding
the globe from a remote and devastated valley, reaching our ears even from a
wrecked base camp on Mount Everest. Ours
has become a global village, to use a term coined by Marshall McLuhan. Within hours, people of all nationalities
inside Nepal began giving first-person accounts of the quake. We also heard from the group of nine Greek
excursionists whose mountain tour guide absconded with their money, forcing
them to leave Kathmandu the day before the disaster occurred. Thanks to technology, we smile and we grieve with
strangers. Our hearts ache in real time for
homeless people huddled under blankets in the cold and the rain, for all the Hindu
and Buddhist mourners busy cremating their dead, for all the bare-headed locals
digging with their hands, for the helmeted rescue teams risking their
necks. We hope together, as a human pool,
that hospital tents will spring up quickly, that people will not die due to adverse
conditions. We are aware as we tend to
our own business far away that others are experiencing extreme misery and
danger. While all this pathos is
happening at the poverty-stricken top of the world, where climbers film
avalanches, and the Nepalese bewail the loss of ancient palaces (close to where
Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci filmed "The Little Buddha"), and
the very last survivors are somehow snatched from the jaws of death, the
Italians will continue to be aware that every day people are escaping dysfunctional,
war-torn regions and entering their country illegally. Most of these "boat people" are caught
in some crossfire; they arrive hungry and abused. Worse, many of their fellows have been maimed
or killed by chance, whenever not massacred outright. By now, we owe it to them to stop and think
about the reasons for their plight. Who
or what has destabilized their countries, and for what purpose? Time, space and technology are surely
demonstrating that the misery of other people becomes ours in the end, whether
it be material, emotional or spiritual misery.
In 1991, at the annual Italian
song festival in a place called Sanremo, Umberto
Tozzi sang a song he wrote, Gli altri
siamo noi, with lyrics by Giancarlo Bigazzi. The words of that song are more relevant today
than ever: In questo mondo, piccolo oramai, gli altri siamo noi. "In this world, by now very small, other
people are us." In this new, wired century,
our interconnectedness is becoming more evident, disaster after disaster. From nation to nation, and continent to
continent, our problems are interlaced like a net. We normally sit back and watch "other
people" floundering in the mud and flailing in the waves, yet deep down in
our hearts we have always intuited the truth.
Which is? We're all in the soup. UN'AMERICANA
A VENEZIA
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