THINKING GLOBAL

I'm a news junky, even though the habit is detrimental to my sleep patterns.  I need to know what's going on.  I want to be informed although I seriously wonder why when the information gained by listening to the news is so confusing and/or infuriating. 

It's not that this specific period of history has worse stories than other times have had.  The earliest monster bad news story that I can remember was the Cuban missile crisis. I was only six at the time so obviously I didn't understand anything about it except that my parents were frightened, but believe me, something that scares your parents that much it absolutely terrifies a kid.

I also remember my Grade 3 teacher telling us the US president had been shot dead, and the night that my favourite radio station turned off the music and would talk only of a guy named Martin Luther King, someone I had never heard of but when I asked mom she knew, and again a news story had the power to upset her.

Back then it felt like, being Canadian, we lived outside the danger zone that America seemed to occupy.  For sure the border was only 40 miles away, but there was this imaginary line there that said we were a different people.  You only had to look at a globe - there was that 49th parallel separating us; below it they were some serious kind of colour like slate blue or money green, and above it we were pink; Canada was usually pink.

Time went on.  Jet travel pulled the planet into an ever-tightening ball of business dealings, tourist travels, and unfortunately, foreign government meddling.  None of these things were new to the human experience, but now there were no bounds of 'too far away'.  Nothing brought this home to me more than 9/11.  Up until that beautiful September morning - if I had thought about it all, which I didn't - I would have said that North America was protected by enormous distance and huge oceans from the ugliness that was happening in the Middle East.  As we all discovered that day, our planet is much too small for that kind of thinking. 

The World Health Organization warns us all the time; with the human population in constant motion as it is, a disease hatched in any region of the world can infect us all within mere days.  One wishes that the same level of vigilance could be put on the diseases called Hate and Intolerance, because they spread just as fast having no more respect for those imaginary border lines between countries than any other deadly pathogens.

Violence and carnage against innocent people are perpetuated every day; the news overflows with it.  Fanned by greed and false feelings of superiority the flames of destruction wipe out concert goers, market shoppers, holidayers, babies, children, men and women alike.  The intent seems to always be to make to next massacre more shocking than the last.  On one level the evil that is out there is winning - the body count continues to go up - but on the other hand it is too much to take in.  The shock and awe tactic is losing its edge.  It's not a case if "will it happen again?" but "where will it happen next?"

So, this latest time it was Canada's turn - innocent men at prayers.  No reason at all, just a young man with his head full of poisonous beliefs, his soul drained of humanity.

As I sat and digested the story I felt shame that my reaction to it lacked intensity.  Where was the emotion that Paris or Nice had stirred up in me?  And all the others before them?  I should be twice as mad that my country was now having to deal with the horror, but I wasn't.  Was I becoming immune to the violence?  Was it my human response to overload?

At the end of that newscast was the image of the Eifel Tower going dark in respect of those lost in the tragedy in a mosque in Quebec City.  This quiet, powerful, beautiful statement said to me "We are all one" and something shifted in my thinking.  It wasn't that I was becoming immune to the hatred.  And I am a proud Canadian, but I realized I was not counting lives lost on our soil any more important than those lost elsewhere.  The words "we are all in this together" is what France's gesture of respect was saying, and I understood it was how I was feeling too.  Imaginary lines and distance mean nothing in today's world. 

Today's globes aren't the multi-coloured jig saw puzzles of my youth.  Instead they depict what the planet really looks like - the water is blue, the land is either lush and green or brown with drought, less and less of it is white with ice and snow.  We cannot afford thinking that says we are in any way removed from what goes on somewhere else - or to continue to nourish hate with more talk of hate. 

I shut the news off this morning; I need a break.