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

[butterscotch711.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but... Colin Powell was just on my TV saying that America wants to help victims of the tsunami because it will help fight terrorism.

The UN is saying it will take a decade to deal with this thing and rebuild. It would be really, really wonderful if the world could be compassionate for a full decade.

[karenkay.livejournal.com]

Thanks for mentioning all this. I have gotten stuck on my anger at the comparison to 9/11 and haven't been able to move beyond that; this nudged me out of that. So your sermon did some good.

(I'm just teasing, this was far from sermonlike.)

[barbarakitten-t.livejournal.com]

i'm glad you posted this, and i am looking forward to reading more of your non-sermons. (i friended you because you are a Friend of Friends...and i think it's probably a good thing i did....)

[kaysho.livejournal.com]

I did like an article someone wrote (I'm being deliberately vague because I can remember neither where I read it nor who wrote it) in which they commented that it would be ironic if the "brotherhood of nations" that the tsunami was causing to break out all over a generally unstable region might mean that, in the long run, the tsunami would actually save more lives than it took.