by Trifecta » Mon Oct 24, 2005 8:24 am
How To Endure Disaster Fatigue<br>Too much death and catastrophe and war? Spirit overloaded? There is<br>one thing you can try<br>- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist<br>Friday, October 14, 2005 <br><br><br>You can take drugs. You can drink heavily. You can numb yourself with<br>any number of whoopers and downers and zappers and nerve calmers,<br>prescription and illegal and everything in between, thus rendering<br>your psycho-emotional system moot and null and void and completely,<br>happily unwilling to give much of a damn.<br><br>You can deny. You can reject. You can play dumb. You can ignore the<br>news and shun the headlines and close your eyes to the bloody <br>gruesome photos and go about your work and play in the park with your<br>dog and read only Us Weekly and Boing Boing and pretend that all this<br>horrible global tragedy, these hurricanes and earthquakes and various<br>planetary abuses, the appalling death tolls and severed limbs and<br>blood-drenched streets, they never really happen on the same planet<br>you inhabit.<br><br>Sure, you're not stupid: Deep down you know they're swirling like <br>cold fire all around you, but you can't face them directly. You can't<br>acknowledge too much, too deeply, too quickly, lest it burn your<br>karmic tongue and rip you asunder and depress your spirit and make<br>life just miserable as all hell. It's just too much to process. <br><br>I know how it is. You might say to yourself, just this month alone:<br>"I cannot take any more, over 35,000 people dead from a massive quake<br>in Pakistan and India and hundreds more buried alive in mudslides in <br>Mexico and Guatemala as a result of Hurricane Stan, still more piles<br>of dead in New Orleans and dozens (hundreds?) dying in unimaginably<br>brutal ways every day in bombings and vicious warfare in Iraq, and<br>that doesn't even include the everyday gunfire and the murders and <br>the rapes and the busload of elderly people bursting into flames in<br>Dallas, and the questions cannot help but emerge: Where to put all<br>this bleak information? How to possibly sort through and find solace<br>and hope? And by the way, what the hell is going on? Why so dark and <br>violent and dour all of a sudden? What is happening to the world?"<br><br>It's tempting, it's understandable, to want to block it all out, to<br>take only small doses of the horrors of the planet and shun the rest <br>like a Republican shuns poor people. The world often careens at us<br>hot and fast and mean, and when the atrocities pile up our systems<br>often automatically go into shock -- they want shut down, recoil, and<br>it becomes the most difficult thing of all to remain alert and <br>compassionate and tuned in and remember that context, of course, is<br>all you might have to get you through.<br><br>Context. Perspective. Do you need some? Would it be at all helpful in<br>the wake of all this death and tragedy and a world that seems to be <br>increasingly strained and riotous and overheated? Because a<br>fascinating dose of context arrived just this week, as astonished<br>astronomers noted a stupendous new (well, old) development in deep,<br>deep space, the discovery of a rather shocking distant galaxy that <br>appears to be much more well formed and dense and ripe than any<br>astronomer would have guessed it could be, given its proximity to,<br>you know, the dawn of time.<br><br>In other words, humankind has found yet another phenomenon -- in this <br>case, a massive, mature galaxy connected to a string of 300 galaxies<br>so unimaginably vast it makes our little solar system, our entire<br>Milky Way, seem like a grain of sand floating in a giant cosmic ocean<br>(which, of course, is exactly what it is) -- they found another <br>astounding and potentially world-changing wonder they cannot fully<br>explain, one which, simply put, could alter our entire perception of<br>how and when it was all created in the first place.<br><br>It's called HUDF-JD2 (for Hubble Ultra Deep Field) and it's <br>officially the most distant galaxy on record, meaning it was formed<br>when the universe was but a squealing, gurgling 800 million-year-old<br>infant, and if it's as dense and mature as some scientists believe,<br>then it throws all galaxy-forming theories into confusion and you may <br>take what Nigel Sharp, program officer for extragalactic astronomy<br>and cosmology at the U.S. National Science Foundation, had to say as<br>mantra, as gospel, as balm for your troubled spirit. It is this: "One<br>of the standard problems with the universe is that it's large enough<br>that unlikely things happen pretty often."<br><br>Write it on your hand. Scribble it in lipstick on the bathroom<br>mirror. Tattoo it onto your tongue and then lick it onto your lover's <br>tailbone because it is perhaps the most beautiful truism you will<br>hear all year.<br><br>But this is not the important part. HUDF-JD2 per se isn't what can<br>provide a tiny bit of balm to your tragedy-overdosed, Bush-ravaged, <br>violence-numbed heart. The important part is how this major discovery<br>is itself but a speck, a glimmer, a hint of a whisper of the vastness<br>of Things We Still Don't Understand.<br><br>Which is to say, what we know of this world, of life, of death, of <br>God, of time, of the cosmos, of all mankind's knowledge and all our<br>experience and all our collected wisdom from millions of years<br>sitting on this spinning water balloon still fits into a tiny<br>thimble, a small Ziploc sandwich bag tossed into a massive churning <br>shimmering sea of mystery and uncertainty and unquenchable weirdness.<br><br><br>There. Is that better? Does that give any solace? Can you step back<br>and take the longer view and see the planet in context of the cosmic <br>mystery, the Deep Unknown, with the never-ending parade of human<br>tragedy merely part of a larger, bittersweet galactic circus, life<br>merely a single line of obtuse poetry and death merely a giant<br>question mark? No? Try it again. Look at the stars. Look deeper. <br>Remember, in space, no one can hear you scoff.<br><br>Personally, I suggest balance, a little bit of everything. Stay<br>informed, read like mad, feel the world deeply, but shop and play and<br>take your happy inebriants and have as much sex as possible. Study <br>the news intently and donate money to charities and volunteer when<br>you can and, if nothing else, quite literally hunker down and pray<br>your ass off to whatever potent divine energy you believe in, even if<br>it's just yourself, your own breath. Offer up healing and hope from <br>your heart to the world, as pure energy, raw light, if at all<br>possible.<br><br>And then sigh heavily and take off your clothes and drink a whole<br>bottle of very good cold sake as you take a very hot bath, restlessly <br>content in the knowledge that you're merely part of this vast<br>cosmological uncertainty, that Earth itself is one of Nigel's<br>"unlikely things" that, well, just sort of happened. Close your eyes,<br>take a deep breath, check out the long view. Hey, it's the universe: <br>It's not supposed to make sense.<br><br> <p></p><i></i>