A Change Of Mood

[poliphilo]

I used to write sermons for a living and I'm liable, if I don't keep a check on myself, to slide into pulpit rhetoric.

Which is one good reason for not writing too much about the tsunami. I don't trust myself not to be cheap.

But there's just this one thing I want to say: the public mood has changed. For the past couple of years it's been Them and Us and War against Terror and ugly, ugly, ugly, and now, suddenly, it's Brotherhood of Man. Westerner and Easterner, rich and poor, Muslim and Christian, believer and secularist- we're all in this together.

And wonderful things have happened. Pakistan sent aid to its old enemy India, national leaders have discovered that there are votes in being kind and the warplanes and warships are being used to carry food and medicine and water.

Comments

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

I do think this trauma will make a difference. 9/11 swung the world towards conflict and confrontation and this is swinging us back the other way.

I hope you are right. The current paranoia is sickening us all.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I think the paranoia has lifted. At least it has over here. For over a week now there's been no news except news of the tsunami. The politicians and their cunningly spun webs of fear have been brushed aside- almost with contempt.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

I think (sniffing the air) that it's true here, too!

Like we live in a bell jar and the lid has been lifted for a moment. I hope it will last.

Bush just talked: he gave us website addresses where we could send money.

A bit late--most of us have already been sending money--it's so little to do, and if we lived closer, I know (because we do this all the time for regional disasters, as I'm sure you do, too) we'd be piling blankets and water bottles and canned goods onto trucks.

Last night I saw a woman sitting alone on a Southeast Asia beach, looking out to sea. A commentator said many people sit by the water, waiting for their children to return to them.

I have felt grief in my life, but not like that. I can't even imagine it. Sending money seems so useless, when I wish so much I could put a blanket around that woman and just sit beside her.

We are all, I think, waking up to a sense of family that we had forgotten. As you said.

It is in the air. If only it will last.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

The people are setting the pace and Bush is playing catch-up.

Our own Foreign Secretary gave a press conference this morning to say that the British government will match private giving pound for pound. He sounded slightly sheepish and defensive.

[halfmoon-mollie.livejournal.com]

The people are setting the pace and Bush is playing catch-up.

I think Bush should take all the money he is intending to spend on his inauguration and donate to the tsunami disaster aid program.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

A nice idea. But it would take a big man to make that sort of gesture.