The human tragedy
The shock wave of grief after the crash of AI 171 should make us mindful of the fragility of life
Send not to know for whom the bell tolls/It tolls for thee, wrote John Donne. The great divider that is death is, with cruel paradox, also the great unifier.
As grief engulfed the families and near ones of the hundreds who perished, heartfelt messages of condolence, sympathy, and offers of assistance flooded in from across the globe, from ally and adversary alike.
Death is the ultimate equaliser, the inescapable common denominator, that rules all life. Our birth is fortuitous, a chance happening, a random conjunction created from the chaos of cellular matter. But once born, the only certitude in life is the ending of it.
The death of another is a forerunner of our own, a darkness at noon, reminding us of our own mortality.
And like a storyteller of endless invention, the devices death conjures are infinite in their variety, reflecting the underlying irony of life that its greatest creativity is displayed in its dissolution.
The cards are stacked in favour of the dealer, Death. To the natural calamities of earthquakes, floods, droughts and famines, are added the perils that progress unwittingly brings in its wake.
The growth and spread of cities and urban centres in Europe resulted in the scourge of the Black Death, the bubonic plague of the Middle Ages, which took a toll of over 50mn lives, wiping out half the then population of the continent. The greater the concentration of people, the richer the winnings for the deadly Croupier.
But the greatest sleight of hand employed by the deathly Card Sharp is a form of murder-suicide called War, waged for region, or religion, ideology, or insanity.
Even as human ingenuity explores the reaches of outer space and delves into the mysteries of brain and mind, there are 56 areas of warfare ongoing on our planet today, exacting over 160,000 deaths annually, including the so-called collateral damage of women and children.
This is the Dealer’s final trump card: Making us complicit in our own destruction. That’s the real human tragedy.
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
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