A life, a war, and a spill.

I spoke with a client recently, who related that the US-Iraq war has been going on as long as her youngest child has been alive: 7 years.  (The Afghanistan war is not quite as old as her eldest child, but then again, Afghanistan, it seems, has always experienced conflict with a foreign people on its soil.)  Quite a different way to think about it, for me.  When speaking of periods of time such as one decade or two, it is an abstract matter.  However, bringing a human into the mix illustrates a clear view of just what can happen in that time.  Zora, the girl, is very active, cognizant, creative.  She has braces on her teeth, dances and plays softball, attends private school, sings along with songs on the radio, made her own bookbag, sees a speech therapist, etc.  In all of the years she has been alive, she has developed every day toward young adulthood.  And the war continues.

As the Gulf oil spill enters the 65th day of horror, I wonder what this means in human terms of growth.  Surely, the correlation won't be the same as the aforementioned.  A human is only an embryo after these seven plus weeks; this growth doesn't seem enough to illustrate the vast damage done in this time frame.  In one hour, eleven lives were lost.  For hours afterward, the workers on the Deepwater Horizon rig watched helplessly as the rig burned through the night, from a raft on the water.  In the days since the spill, countless livelihoods have been compromised.  The real crime is in the wild.  The animals and water fowl have great ability to sense danger and flee, but this is different, creeping in and affecting their habitat.

I'll conclude here, surely hoping that we humans have the ability to learn from this; humans have always had a tendancy toward violence, but hopefully we can absorb some of the pain that we have inflicted and learn from it, to try to develop alternatives for dirty energy and our own perspective toward our fellow creatures.

Art: Banksy.  Image: Redefine Magazine.