vaneramos | Tsunami

Marian at Casa Loma yesterday.

I photographed this image in a darkened glass, which reflected Christmas lights along the corridor facing it. The ghostly image of Marian's face was projected from a nearby aperature through an apparatus behind the the glass.

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Listening to the repeated stories of human tragedy from Asia during the past two days, I can't avoid filtering it through my previous work experience with World Vision Canada. I worked there as a writer in the media relations department for five years. As a matter of fact, about one month after I was hired, we had a disaster of similar proportions to deal with. In May 1990, a cyclone hit the coast of Bangladesh, killing more than 100,000 people. From that date, I was immersed in the charity industry. The experience has changed the way I view the world.

I want to reread Annie Dillard's book, For The Time Being, which philosophically addressed that disaster and the magnitude of death. We cannot grasp tragedy of this magnitude the way we experience the loss of a loved one, or even a a small number of untimely casualties. If we started to face it one life at a time, we would soon go mad. If we tried to interrogate deity—a powerful consciousness within the cosmos—we would come up with far more questions than answers. Dillard addresses those questions as well as any theologian I have ever read.

Perhaps it was because of the endless misery and sadness of human existence that I stopped believing in God. Not that I rejected Love. The creation itself is at once beautiful, magnificent, and savage, inhuman and incomprehensible. I do not suppose any deity capable of creating such a cosmos could possibly be concerned with my response to it. The question of why bad things happen is quite pointless. As an atheist I do not need to worry about the answer.

There is the more reasonable question of what to do.

This week I learned that one of my former co-workers in Mississauga, Grant Cassidy, is now located in India. I heard him interviewed on CBC. He was as serious about his work as anyone I knew. I suppose that by going to the Third World he has applied his life to the dilemma more purely and intimately.

I can't consider the relief effort without considerable cynicism. Not that I hold any particular criticism for World Vision or any of the others. But their work reminds me of a small dog scratching at the door of a great hall filled with opulence and indulgence, while the outer realm of poverty and suffering remains incomparably larger. Ninety per cent of the world's population lives in abject poverty, much poorer than anyone who will ever read these words.

It bothers me that disasters like this appeal to people's emotions enough to elicit a monetary response. But in a few days or weeks, most will forget that millions of people are suffering and dying from malnutrition and preventable diseases every day. In that context, 60,000 fatalities is only a few. Most people in industrialized countries haven't begun to understand how closely our welfare is tied to the rest of the world.