Friday, October 07, 2005
The wrath of Gods! Why do we embellish annihilation!
God seems to be ideology blind, color blind and race blind. Natural disasters hit at random without any regards of our beliefs. No special treatment is offered to the faithful neither to the ungodly. Natural disasters hit without any regard to how far or near are the inhabitants of a region to God or Allah. God also does not like to punish its children’s and take vengeance of political actions on poverty ridden populace and masses. The impartiality of Gods action is engrained in natural even-handedness of nature. If a city sits near a seismic zone it may have higher chances of an earthquake like a city that sits below the sea level has a higher chance of getting innundated. Nature by design is pro construction and not destruction. Obliteration is followed by an effort to recreate. Nature does not get tired to punish us for venturing into new terrain and we don’t get tired to reconstruct after every severity.
It is not the wrath of the God when a big sea wave appears from no where and devours ordinary folk, Gods have no role to play, it is the way mother earth has moved in this timeless journey of ours. Some bigots said that New Orleans and Katrina was God wrath on American Imperialism I counter it by saying, was Tsunami a wrath of God on Allah fearing people of South East Asian? or Was God showing his special mercilessness to Bam when the whole city got wiped out! Nature has its own way of levelling things; let’s not play God or Allah against each other. God loves us all.
It is easy to report devastation; it attracts a lot more attention. The exaggeration of numbers like 100,000 civilians dying in Iraq or 10,000 feared dead in New Orleans are found to be vastly overstated. Exaggeration of numbers is just not limited to media, politicians can also be charged with overstatement and overreaction to calamites. Post-Katrina and Pre-Rita, I saw the Mayor of Houston demanding everyone to leave the city as many were led to believe that Rita will land universally along the Gulf coast. Nobody wanted to be negligent in warnings; 'exaggeration of obliteration' has become our natural tendency. We are becoming people who like to live with little hope and more anxiety.
The hyper protection is necessary but it is necessary to conduct a cost benefit analysis of our actions to size of the catastrophe, and our ability to deal with it, only than it may lead to a more rational decision making process. Humanity has reached to this level of prosperity by facing threats and finding ways to evade them not running away from them. Extinction on a mass level has been integral part of our journey. It has happened to this blue planet many times before, it may happen again. We are gifted equally with inbuilt process of healing also. Planning for extreme would take the pleasure out of living and make our living miserable. Nature likes chances, something’s are left for better fortunes also.For Napoleon it was not important in Waterloo that which one of his Generals would lead the charge it was also important who was the luckiest, sometime we all need that extra bit of luck to save from vagaries of nature.
Houston was not as critically below water as New Orleans was and in terms of geography it was not New Orleans; its levees would not just have given away. It is amplification of fortification to evade disasters that is astonishing, putting millions on roads reflects failure of science and our organisation that should guide us reasonably well to the point where maximum impact will occur.Natural disasters will come, extinctions and natural selections are natural phenomenon and cannot be avoided, over fine-tuning would be far more cumber some. Asteroids have most recently led to mass extinction as near as 75,000 years back, Toba extinction nearly wiped mankind out of this earth equation. But we survived and multiplied to 6 billion plus today. Short of pre-warnings systems and education how to watch coming of Tsunami making walls against future Tsunamis is useless. The tectonic plates in the earth crusts will move, the phenomenon of earth crests are not dependent on few childish toys that we play around with.We are not able to abuse earth, this living thing is far beyond our comprehension.
The earth's surface is broken into seven large and many small moving plates. These plates, each about 50 miles thick, move relative to one another an average of a few inches a year. At transform-fault boundaries, plates move horizontally past each other. The San Andreas Fault zone is an example of this type of boundary where the Pacific Plate on which Los Angeles sits is moving slowly northwestward relative to the North American Plate on which San Francisco sits. Millions of years ago the Eurasian plate movements caused Himalayas to rise.
Imagine a self conscious being witnessing Himalayas rising and reporting the associated earth quakes and destruction? Would he consider that to be fault of green emissions? Like many blamed the recent Tsunami to obscure nuclear test explosions in the Pacific’s. One Karakatoa eruption releases far more obnoxious gases and so does these underground Tsunamis that alters the balance of Ozone layers far more adversely than our little gizmos and gimmicks that we blame all our ills on. Nature has its own cure and journey of billions of years would not end by one century of ‘abuse!’ If even we agree to call it so.
Lets think for moment and stop self flagellation, we are not responsible for movements of these plates over hot molten lavas, and this is the nature of the beast we live with. Our limitations are immense and we need to know and prepare the best we can. We don’t have all the answers and we shall have not all the answers. We like to confront nature, we like to live in cities which sit on faults, and we like to live in cities that are below the sea level that is how we have progressed, by taxing nature, sometime punished for going against the natural law.
We need to train our minds to live with the tragedies and catastrophes which is part of our natural rearing, however this should not detract us from preparing for the transformation that can bring challenging times on us. Good times and bad times are part and parcel of life, lets not get inundated with good times only sometime nature brings on us some tribulations and tests, we need to come out of those collectively mature and without huge overstatements and overkill. Instant solutions in a universe that has taken 16 billon years to reach at this point are self-defeating. Risk reward in any response needs to be the basis of our response.
Threat levels have multiplied inside our heads and lead to comparisons of oranges with apples that only serve to worsen the situation. Politicisation of failures and the ability of the media to generate sensationalism is another key constituent that helps belligerency and cynicism of media to grow. Human concerns are of little importance as far as political points can be scored. The division of various stratums of society as a result of the global war on terror has also resulted in a new kind of polarization whereby human disasters are victim of politics. Some political points were scored when Katrina failures were nailed on Bush but no one evaluated that natural disasters have their own destructive dynamics. Once the civilian infrastructure was swept away, very little could have been done on local level until the Feds got involved.
It was not an event as huge as Tsunami, this time inundated a whole city instead of a region, and hence the repercussions were severe. I did not see from Katrina that US is particularly poor or could not manage disaster, rather for what it was Katrina deaths were quite low in comparison to the intensity of the storm. Hurricanes are part of life in Keys and Gulf, and it was expected that hurricane flying over New Orleans may compromise the levees, this one was right over on the East and had it been little more west the problems would have multiplied. The rains of Bombay in July were another example of vagaries of nature, one side of the city was deluged with meters of rains in less than 36 hours, and how one could prepare for such extremes. Our over confidence and our lack of humility in face of ‘Mother Nature trials’ instils in us demand for answers for everything, something’s we may not have any answers!
Our minds think sometime very bizarrely, we worry more about putting out the NY skyscrapers lights and dimming its skyline during migratory seasons so as to save the 4000 odd migrating birds that have died in collisions with these skyscrapers since 1997. However, when it comes to humans we hesitate to incorporate similar solutions. Drunken driving deaths in 2003 are still reported at above 17,000 deaths yet we tighten the definition of intoxication by limiting intake but do not ban alcohol. In case of birds we put off the lights, in the case of humans we don’t put ‘off’ the culprit, rather we live with it. Risk and reward analysis dictates that alcohol is far more therapeutically an integral part of relaxing and as a huge revenue generator hence the risk should be managed albeit the loss of life is colossal.
In the transformation of political scene we hate instinctively installing ‘dictators’ but are not prepared to work for long term solutions, for that we need little sacrifice. We work on our ‘nuclear time scales’ for problems that require our ‘standard historical time scales’ of at least a decade or more. We have cosmic time scale for nature to act that is related to 16 billion years of our existence from the big bang when the first materials in out body cells were formed. We should have patience to work on this time scale for problems of our planet to evolve and resolve. For our national disputes and rivalries we should depend on our historical time scale that is a function of our 10,000 years of known history as some sort of quasi civilisation of Sumerians came in to existence. Our nuclear time scale should be restricted to our daily lives only; we should not mix the time scale of challenges and the screens on which these challenges are being played. Time as we all know is the biggest healer, this shall all pass. Amidst all these sufferings let us help each other to understand the underlying currents of positive, creative and optimistic living.
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