a confession

Blessed are the blind for they see no evil
Every moment a chance, a chance to forget
Like animals we flee from the flames
Ignorance conceals the blood on our hands
- This Ending

I am rebooting my brain into English to finish my translation project now that my book is finally edited. So there will be a day or two when I play tag with my other language, but rest assured. Swedish will return, it just hurts to switch too hard and too fast. Last night at the birthday party of a friend we started talking about guilt, activism, animal rights and the fact that we, as people, seldom do as much as we might want to for the causes that we support. So, in that spirit I have a confession to make.

This is a confession not made lightly.

I am an activist. No, that’s not the confession, that’s the background to it. I am an activist, with an opinion on every subject. I’ve been in Greenpeace back before it turned weird, I’ve worked on the issues of integration that bisexuals have in both the straight and gay communities, and I’m a union representative negotiating salaries and benefits. At least I was before I lost my job to the recession. I consider myself to be interested in almost any form of social injustice, and willing to speak out on most of them. I can debate healthcare, abortion, animal rights, veganism, socialism, religion and pretty much any kind of -ism and I will have an informed opinion on it. I will care. I’m a very empathic person, to the point of getting utterly depressed if my friends are having difficulties. I suppose by some standards I am a pretty decent human being.

Except things are more complicated than that.

Because, you see, I don’t care about people.

Oh, I do, on an individual level. But as soon as I take but one step back, it becomes as much an intellectual exercise as anything else. You see, when I fight, I fight against things more than I fight for people. Anger is my motivator there, a deep, unquenchable fury over the injustices of the world. I didn’t do my union work because I cared about my fellow workmates (with a few exceptions), I did it because I felt that it was unfair that they would be screwed over by the company, and even more, I felt that companies and corporatism on a grand level was wrecking our world, and that this little grassroots thing was my best way of striking out against the system. I like having enemies to fight. I am not Gandhi, and neither am I Mother Theresa. I am pissed off, angry as hell, and smart enough to know that going out to plant a bomb somewhere has never solved a thing. I should care about the people involved, I know, and in a vague, detached way I actually do. Had it not been for what I am about to tell you next, I would probably have thought myself a humanitarian.

And then, we have disasters.

I am sure you all have seen them on the telly. The falling towers of 9/11. The sinking of Estonia in the Baltic seas. The Tsunami. Katrina. The Greensburg tornado. Haiti. And just recently the fifth strongest earthquake ever measured. We get disasters flooding into our lives from across the globe on a regular basis, where people’s lives are ripped apart and spread out for us to ogle. And I know I should be sad. And I know I should be horrified. People are dead. People are dying, people that I would probably have liked quite a bit if I just got to know them. If not for the luck of being born elsewhere, one of them might have been me or someone I loved. And yet…

… the destruction is nothing short of glorious.

There is something about vast, wholesale destruction that makes me gasp, not in horror of what is destroyed, but in awe at the wonder that is our world. There is that bit at the back of my brain that watch as the towers topple, utterly fascinated by the fact that this is history in the making. What will happen now? Where will the world go? Is this the gunshots in Sarajevo that will ignite World War 3? Or will it just be a Hindenburg? I spare no thoughts for the people trapped there until later, looking back and feeling slightly sick that while people were jumping to their deaths, I was transfixed by the importance of it all. And yet I go online to watch it all again, with the same sick fascination I get from poking an open wound or holding my finger in the candle flame.

When the Tsunami hit, it was our national trauma, since it killed a huge number of Swedes as it hit our most popular holiday resorts right around Christmas. This could very well have happened to my parents, who go there almost every winter. There were interviews everywhere with survivors, shell-shocked from the experience of losing everything and everyone. And yet, when I watch the footage of that first wave rolling in, a single man standing upright on the beach, only turning to walk away moments before it engulfs him, I wonder if he felt the same as me. That some things are so devastating that we cannot turn away, even when it kills us. I watch the footage from Banda Ache, where the wave is not water but wreckage, an enormous grinding flood of dark debris growling through the streets like some ancient beast, devouring everything in its path. I watch it, and I am in awe of the destructive power of nature, there is no room in my head at that time for the people. There never is.

I wonder sometimes, if this fascination is what can make people do terrible thing in times of war. I wonder if people have stood, transfixed by the beauty of artillery bombardment, despite the casualties it caused. I wonder if the pilots that bombed Dresden ever looked down and thought the flames were pretty or whether the survivors of Hiroshima ever thought that the bright light and mushroom cloud in the distance was ethereal and serene before the pressure wave tore them away. I wonder how it felt to stand there and see the wave approach the shore, bearing down on you. I should feel empathy with the people affected, I know this. Deep down, I am angry for myself for not doing it. I can, once things are over I am sometimes racked with nightmares of being there myself, of my family and friends being caught with erupting volcanoes, floods and hurricanes. And yet, I seek out more. I watch movies. I watch documentaries. I watch online footage and I feel. And I think; there is a terrible beauty in watching the world burn. The same beauty as it is looking down from the top of a tall tower, feeling the almost irresistible urge to jump. It is horrible. It will lead to pain and death. It will lead to suffering for the ones left behind. And yet, for that single moment of freefall… how glorious would the world not be?