Wednesday 12 June 2013

old head waters run dry or cry me a river

Tragically a lot of people along the flood plains of the Danube, Elbe, Rhine and the Main are being made to contemplate the unimaginable—starting over and with nothing salvageable. Not comparable to over concurrent outrages, still it seems we were all unwitting accomplices, lulled into thinking that rivers would be contained with concrete and dams, shored up in response to a disaster in 2002, and policies that enabled sloppy, muddy footprints from everyone of us, as contributors.

I cannot imagine what these people are going through—though the images of disaster porn are becoming more vicarious (and shared experiences too). I cannot image what it is like to have lost all ones tangible possession and be faced with the prospects, through misadventure, of starting over, due to a grave engineering miscalculation. Closer to home, we had our share of tense moments too, watched with wringing hands and window-dressing, but these close calls, however mounting and threatening in the imagination-affording dark of night, were never destructive and seemed to stem from a natural string of consequences, unrelenting rains coupled with a premature thaw and so on. But our unbridled stream quickly blushed back to its banks. Rage, although relative, is not an honest attribute, expressed not without concert and competition, and like the suffering and nervous sandbagging, the run-away abuse and consumption is also something for which we are all co-conspirators.