NEWSPAPER COLUMNS
 ¶ Most Recent
¶ Miscellany
|
SUNDAY SPECTATOR
July 21, 2002
Fragility exposed
"It's summer someone told me the other day. Didn't realize at first that he had a point, that it explained all this heat. Here I was, with that tickle in the back of the brain, thinking I'd been wrong about global warming"; that maybe the fright-show environmentalists were right. But no: Ockham's razor and all that; pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate. It's summer therefore it's hot; case closed. In previous summers I have written about a swamp house a cottage beavers children; about books crows and a kestrel; about why not to keep rattlesnakes as pets; about how to cook a cactus. Perhaps some day I'll return to that again; for the moment I do not even feel nostalgic for such whimsy. In my line of work or rather the line upon which I now dangle you anyway look at a clock not a calendar. I'm in my sixth year of writing for a daily something I had generally avoided before being too slow a thinker. The first five years I gradually adjusted to filing columns at least three times a week; and by about Labour Day of last year I had almost got the hang of it. Then suddenly everything changed. For some reason I volunteered to do a kind of "running commentary" -- in the best tradition of Monday night football -- about the "war on terror". This began of course on Sept. 11: the day everything changed including my workaday life. Ten months have now passed in which I do not think I have read more than five books from front to back; and three of those drearily pertaining to my "beat". (I used sometimes to read five books in a week though never any that bored me.) Even during nearly a month of formal vacation I found myself trapped in my laptop each day obliged to keep up with breaking news and with my sources; trying to remain on top of inter-related events developing in several distinct theatres of conflict. Old-fashioned newspaper reporters never had holidays. Instead they had "beats" and like old-fashioned doctors could never really escape from their calling. Stray where they might if anything happened they'd be called back to work; and something always happened. They continued in this way until they were fired or killed. Whereas the contemporary journalist belongs to a union. He only works hard if he really wants to; and anyway working too hard is against the labour laws. Hard drinkin' and hard playin' they were too those old-timers. They built their escapes into their purpose-driven routines. Whereas I for my part have probably drunk less alcohol in the last 10 months than would be good for me. I do not mention this entirely from self-pity more from a kind of gratitude. In the course of this odd exercise of trying to keep up with something no one could keep up with -- this almost unprecedented "war on terror" -- I think I may have learned something. Now curiously enough my discovery was something I already knew. But I only knew it "in theory" not as something formed; knew it in my mind but not in my soul. And it was something about myself probably best expressed in the most colloquial language. I discovered that all my life I'd been what is called "a wanker". I expect this is true of others besides myself but one cannot experience the truth through others. In fact I suspect it applies to most of my "babyboom" generation: raised as we were for no particular purpose except to make ourselves happy. But proud all the same to be something new in the world; perhaps the very first "generation of wankers". Well very few of us have ever behaved as if we had a purpose a true calling. Few have therefore had the sense of being part of something larger than ourselves of being under a commandment. We have lived instead as ends in ourselves as if self-created as if the natural consumers of everything our ancestors had laid up taking it all for granted. I for one instinctively felt deserving of everything inherited with my place and time. I was "effete" (that is the nice way of putting it). But on the morning of Sept. 11th we so many of us began to come awake. Awake as if we had previously been sleeping; awake and suddenly alive to realities that had been concealed. And perhaps awakened in time to save us. It was not mere horror aroused by what we saw nor the outrage nor any desire for revenge. These things were certainly present as natural emotional reactions; but they were only the momentary things. There was something in the experience that went beyond them. It was like the "call of the distant bugler"; the call to rise out of ourselves to find something useful and do it. The call even to prayer as a most useful act and to the life and labour that are its buttress. Not everybody heard it but so many did. And some who did not hear at first began to hear it later. For some at a great distance it takes time for the signal to carry on the wind; for others there is the raw phenomenon of denial. ("Why should this event influence my life neither I nor anyone I know was injured.") For it was not a dismissible disaster an earthquake or a volcano it was an event loaded with meaning. To my mind it was impossible to contemplate what had happened without hearing the angel singing in the ashes. Singing instruction to so many different people to be heard by each in some special way. In my small case I realized that little as I understood about these events I still knew something; that my job was to communicate this little that I knew. There was a role for me a tiny part in a cosmic drama a soldier's place in a vast and strangely inevitable war. "Rise said the angel, you have your task." That war is far from over; far from being fully understood. At so many levels the fragility of our society has been exposed; the unworthiness of our defences. And now there is so much work to do before we can think of summer again. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
|
Top