Recriminations. Scapegoating. People want to know who to blame for this. People want to know how this could happen.
I don't think knowing would help. It's not my focus right now. There are probably going to be some very interesting books written about this period of history later. The historians will have lots of primary sources to work from. They're going to know things we don't know now, we can't understand now, they're going to be able to make sense of it and learn from this disaster.
What bothers me is that they're all based on certain assumptions, you know, about the way the world is and the way the world should be, and we're at a point right now where really, all bets are completely off. All of our past assumptions have been called into question. We are going to have to rebuild them.
And we can't even truly assess the extent of the damage yet. I'm more or less on the side of "total". You know, we don't even know, really know, what happened yet, let alone why it happened. It's fairly evidently awful, and I'm willing today to stop there. I don't want to get into any more detail than that.
Except on the personal level. This is going to be devastating to millions of different people in millions of different, intensely personal ways. My brother was working on trying to open his own bar. That's pretty much out the window now. Not going to work out. Reminds me of my great grandfather. He worked his way up at a grocery store and wound up buying the store. In 1929.
I've talked to my great-aunt about it, because she lived through it. Everybody reacted to the depression in different ways. Some people gobbled up all the real estate they could and threw people out of their homes. My great-grandfather, he gave away the food he had in his store. Nothing else to do. Nobody had money to afford it. Was he going to just let the food go bad and spoil? That would be stupid.
That's my heritage. That's where I come from.
Whether or not it's true, my emotional reaction is as if everything is gone, the world I grew up knowing, that world exists only in memory. But memory, and the stories we tell, they are really powerful things. When we choose to rebuild, where do we start?
And I start with human rights. I may have to change the words I use. The idea of human beings having "fundamental worth and dignity" sounds like a cruel joke today, a twisted and repellent lie. How long can we mouth words we don't believe?
So, we are animals. Perhaps less than animals, because animals show no malice. And maybe this is something we can aspire to.
[Note: It was subsequently pointed out to me by my more scientifically informed friends that the more intelligent animals are perfectly capable of malice. Particularly bottle-nose dolphins.]
