Sunday, March 13, 2011

The times they are a changing...

I'm in the mood for some vitriol. But, of course, I won't vent too much. It's not really socially acceptable, and even if it were I really have nothing to vent about. We haven't lost our house. We haven't even lost our power. We don't have 10 foot waves of debris smashing through our back yard, and there's only a very very small danger of suffering from nuclear fallout (when I say very small, I mean very small).

I should be thankful I have pretty much everything I need; I should greet each new day as a challenge; I should be grateful I can have a shower every day and even though we're still boiling water we probably don't have to. Every now and then I'll forget and take a swig straight from the tap or a mouthful when I'm in the shower. Haven't died. Yet.

There are scales of destruction, and there are scales of dealing with it. Perhaps I'm a simpering weakling but I doubt I would have done very well at all if we had been without power for the last three weeks. I know someone who only got power back a few days ago, and water only yesterday. Apparently it smells like a swimming pool and looks like chamomile tea. And they still have to pee outside in the moonlight. Could be worse, though, I guess.

You look at the TV and watch unprecedented footage of a tsunami sweeping over farmland in Japan, and you just can't believe it. It's UNbelievable.

Three weeks ago, the international community watched unbelievable scenes of down town Christchurch. We watched the same scenes. It was OUR city and we couldn't believe it either.

Compared to what Japan got, our pathetic little shake seems insignificant. Already the social networking sites are abuzz with endless variations of "thank goodness ours wasn't as bad". For surely it could have been. And if Ken Ring is right, it might yet be.

I was driving in Riccarton the other day, and I had the conscious thought that if a 6.3 did this, what devastation an 8 would bring. Until a few weeks or months ago, those comparisons were meaningless. Now, they are all too fearfully real.

The experts would have us believe the 6.3 was the "big" aftershock they were expecting. But expectation is a fickle thing. If we didn't really "expect" the 6.3, we certainly didn't "expect" the 7.1 in September. I have to take issue with all those people who, while I was growing up, promised me that any big earthquake in New Zealand was more than likely going to hit Wellington. Perhaps that's why all my life I've never liked Wellington, despite never having been there until I was well into my 30s.

Nobody in Japan was expecting to have to deal with what they are now having to deal with. Not really. And so, too, in Christchurch. We never really expected to have to deal with what we're dealing with. Not really.

Whether or not our houses are rubble around our feet, or our water looks like chamomile tea, there are things we have to deal with that we were not expecting to have to deal with. Photos of people you once loved are all over the news. Those people are now dead. Hitherto happy go-lucky children are now wetting the bed at night and are afraid to go outside. Jobs have been lost and therefore houses and hopes for the future are seriously threatened. Anxiety levels are through the roof, and all that negative energy is poisoning the city just as surely as a nuclear drift would. Relationships are started and ended in the wake.

There's a lot of talk about how the city will look and feel when all this is over. I suspect that when the dust settles it will be unrecognisable.

Someone glibly said recently that god would not send anything on us that we couldn't handle. Yeah right. Tell that to the millions who commit suicide every year; to those who take up drinking or snorting coke to get through; to those who think violence is an acceptable release; to those who have to take a cocktail of drugs every day to get through it; to those who are shrivelling into their own little isolated corner of the world.

The reality is that regardless of our circumstances, we are all having to deal with things that cannot be quantified. We are all having emotional responses to the things around us that are affecting our daily endeavours.

I do believe in the human spirit. But I believe it can be a very fragile thing, and it doesn't always shine through, or even survive. We see great stories of heroics on the TV. We see beautiful images of kind and caring people doing great things for their communities. We see some people overcoming overwhelming disadvantage to not only survive but succeed. To those I say YAY! It does us good to see the human spirit triumph in adversity.

But so too do we see and hear of tragic stories of defeat and unending despair. For obvious reasons, we don't see them in the media. Nobody really wants to hear about them. We don't glorify weakness. We don't praise despair. Unless there's a particular quirk to the story with significant news value. And as long as there's an element of triumph or success to it in the end.

It'll be years before we're told that 2011 will have seen an increase in the suicide rate, especially in Christchurch and Fukushima. An increase in the uptake of illicit drugs. We're already hearing how domestic violence has increased, but there's a whole other agenda being pushed there.

My point is the whole city is on edge. There's not a single person who lives in Christchurch that has not been significantly impacted by the events of the last three weeks. Or the last six months. It's changing who we are. It's changing how we see the world and each other. It's changing how we feel about each other and the world. Regardless of whether you live in Halswell or Bexley, we are significantly different people than we were six months ago.

The expectation (fickle thing that it is) would be to end a piece like this with something positive. Something to hang your hat on. But what if there's nothing positive? What if I don't see a way through to the light? Am I not entitled to feel that way and express it? It is the way of human nature that there are always more negative stories than positive, more tragedy than comedy. I'm more than confident most of us will survive and be fine (whatever that means). I guess that's more positive than negative. But I'm also aware that many will not. Their lives will be less because of these events. Their lives will have less meaning, and less joy.

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