Defective
mechanisms

9/11: Reflections
Harold Hark
13 September 2002

Watching the docos on September 11 was an exercise in compartmentalising. As it should have been. The fragility of human life was what we were witnessing, forget for the moment why this particular atrocity happened.

Sudden death, we are forced to comprehend, is always lurking around the corner of routine, prosaic moments.

It happens all the time. People starting up their cars to go to work, a wave goodbye to the spouse and the kids, and off they go, never to return. A smash on the freeway, commuter trains colliding, planes suffering mechanical failure at 35,000 feet. Or a heart attack or a stroke in the office, the factory, the shopping centre.

We never really know if we will see the next sunrise or the next minute.

Somehow, the very real inevitability of our mortality remains elusive. We simply cannot bring it into focus. It's as if the mechanism that would allow the life altering realisation of our eventual death has been switched off. Or removed or never inserted into our DNA. How different the essential quality of life would be if this were not the case.

When death strikes those close to us, whether to a young child or an aged parent, we respond with incredulity, as if it were the last thing we ever expected to happen. We know it happens all the time to others, but that it could happen to us leaves us totally unprepared.

Perhaps the cause of this wilful innocence lies in our failure to grasp the meaning of life itself. Why it happens to us, and what we are meant to do with it. Above all, why so many of us believe that nothing existed before it or after it.

Organised religion has not helped to uncover the mystery. It has, rather, employed its resources over the centuries to stifle the yearning for answers. Monotheistic religions have promised a childlike, fairytale ending to life. Those who have continued to believe in the child's play of the various heavens into adulthood have found it difficult to leave their childish interpretations of existence in an overwhelming universe.

It is no wonder then that the majority of human beings, left with no penetrating instruction on what life means, have decided that this life is all there is, so better to make the most of it. This unimaginative, ultimately antisocial, belief has left us but a few steps above barbarianism.

What is wired into our DNA, however, is compassion. Various ideologies over time have done their best to quash this essential human quality in favour of self-interest, but, when the chips are down, it is our compassion that releases the hero in us.

And that is what we feel watching the story of 9/11. The sudden death of everyday people and the compassionate, heroic attempts of equally everyday people to come to their rescue.

What a pity we cannot feel this genuine compassion for the billions around the world who routinely suffer from policies of anti-social, ultimately barbaric, self-interest.

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