Religious
fundamentalism
is pure evil

A few stumbling words about Bali...
Harold Hark
16 October 2002

Bali was to Australia as Hawaii is to America. It was our holiday resort off the mainland. You could say that a high percentage of Australia's population had either gone there or knew someone who had.

Now, a good many of us will know someone who lost a friend or relative in the bombing.

I don't know about you, but I have been walking around in a daze since it happened, unable to do anything constructive. I keep going back to the newspapers and the heartbreaking stories. And then I get up and walk around in a daze again.

We are in deep strife. It may go on for years. This strife could even precipitate the fall of civilisation.

As yet, I cannot listen to the commentators, neither the ones on my side or the ones on the other side. They are right or they are wrong, but for now, only the horror is getting through.

I guess the reality is this: The buffer between life and extinction is insubstantial. We have to come to terms with this. History is a bloody tapestry covered with the sudden death of loved ones. It used to happen all the time over there, but now it is happening everywhere, even here.

It happens to every generation sooner or later: war, the end of good times. No doubt life will resume its façade of normalcy for awhile. But there is a vicious hatred out there, and we are going to have to deal with it. We need to accept this and remain awake. Vigilance towards infamy, by unbalanced fanatics or our own leaders is the only way out of this encroaching era of doom.

There is nothing for it but to shake off the blithe sleep of the uninvolved. Those of us who have settled for a Born to Consume mentality and to hell with consequences had better think again. Or simply start to think. To survive, we must begin to act as our humanity has always asked us to. Heroically. We must stand up not only to those who would slaughter with bombs, but to those who manipulate our inattentiveness for their own ends. For it is they who turn us into the slaughterers and the slaughtered.

For the moment, though, it is a time to grieve and commiserate. To shudder and rage and, finally, to share the utter emptiness of the ones who have mercilessly been left behind to mourn for the rest of their lives.

Putting oneself in another's shoes has never been so hard.

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