I spotted a young woman last night who was weeping copiously. So I bought her a drink and asked her what was so terrible. She said she couldn't live with the thought tbat the Ku Klux Klan was dismembering her family.Well, okay.
But on later and further reflection, what puzzled me was not that a troubled mind could be driven to distraction by such notions, but that the rest of us can live with the thought of the young Iraqi boy two arms missing who decorated page 2 of yesterday's Financial Times.
I mean, here's a world that presents us with the Holocaust, Americans dragged behind trucks or tied to barbed-wire fences due to an impersonal bias, repeated bombings of an all-too-complacent World Trade Center, Palestinian suicide bombers, Israeli Air Force jets assassinating a rival by dropping a rocket on an apartment building full of sleeping families, Mogadishu, Rwanda, Kosovo, our armed forces shelling civilian populations, our own troops and allies, TV stations and a hotel full of journalists, and, somehow, above it all, George W. Bush and cronies in the White House, and yet we manage as alwaysto go about our daily business.
There's a current console game commercial whose tagline is, "Civilization Is Only Skin Deep." In fact, I wonder at times if civilization is really no more than a massive shared dissociative reaction.