On the Back of a Whale

The Japanese say that their country rests on the back of a whale and earthquakes happen when the beast shifts its position. I've always liked this concept. Beside requiring an incredibly accommodating whale, it reminds us the planet is not inert but alive in the sense that there is a limit to the nonsense it will endure from us.

Now, I'm not saying we are responsible for earthquakes. In the face of no better way to understand their causes, I subscribe to the theory of plate shifting and continental drift. I lived almost 40 years in Hawaii. People living in the Islands know all about moving hot spots as the plates shift. In fact, the newest island, Loihi, is forming now under the ocean off the Big Island.

What I'm saying is if we can't control earthquakes, surely we can control ourselves. If we believe we are on the back of the whale, then common sense says we should respect the animal and understand it will behave like a whale. Why are we surprised when the whale shifts and brings earthquakes and tsunamis? Why are we wasting our time listening to ignorant claims of a pact between Haiti and the devil? It's the whale, for heaven's sake, just doing what it does.

I feel the same impatience watching people in Haiti being dragged out of sub-standard housing that collapsed around them as I felt when I watched Katrina survivors begging for water and food. Worse, I have every expectation that we'll see scenes just like this again when one of our West Coast cities is devastated as New Orleans was. Just what we will need: the media yet again arriving (when relief workers supposedly can't get in) to report every juicy detail of human misery and then provide fodder for the pundits comfortably back hime to shovel out their uninformed guesses and unhelpful speculations.

In fact, sad though I am for those in Haiti, it's the media that I am most discouraged about. Haitian family members in the US and around the world need to know about their loved ones and old neighborhoods, but this continual replaying of the same scenes recalls those dreadful days after 9/11 when we had to endure hours of watching the planes hitting the Twin Towers. It was pandering to our own worst tendencies to want to be entertained. Panders, in fact, is what the media have become in their desperate attempt to keep ratings.

Back when I was in college, eons ago, Marshall McLuhan was just hitting the circuits. His idea was prophetic: he said the medium was the massage (sic). He used the word massage because he wanted to say that the new form of instant communication and broadcast were inevitably going to shape what was broadcast. Today, our technology allows us to view and review (ad nauseum) human suffering and at the same time distance ourselves from it. We have no way to process what we are seeing except to watch it unfold like a movie or television show.

Our technology has, in my personal and admittedly senior opinion, debased our abilities to think metaphorically. Perhaps if we could envision the earth as a living creature, we might be better at not assuming arrogantly that everything here is for us to use and discard (a viewpoint for which I will not forgive the creation myth in Genesis). We might be better at helping our fellows instead of judging them. We might be better at remembering John Donne's words that no one of us is an island, even if some allow themselves to be smug and comfortable and moralistic.








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