Strange Days

Well, if there’s one thing we’re learning this year it’s that everything in life is precarious, including life itself. You can surround yourself with insurance and possessions, eat organic food, exercise every day and pray to one god or hundreds. It makes no difference. If a meteor has your house in its path, it’s sayonara sucker, gender, creed or the state of your health notwithstanding.

Our starter for this year was the global financial turmoil. Yes, for sure, the rich are best placed to ride this one out, partly because they’ve done best out of the last 10 years of financial growth – especially here in Ireland, in the USA and in Asia. But depending on where they put their money, even they’ve lost, often a lot.
That’s cold comfort to those who are losing their jobs, whose homes are more expensive to rent or buy and whose wages and pension funds (for those lucky enough to have one) are worth less.
Three things underlie the world economic crisis. The first is the haemorrhaging of American money into the war in Iraq. It just sucks money away from productive use in what is still the world’s biggest economy.
The second is the recurrent mix of greed and stupidity that is such a central characteristic of modern capitalism, that completely unjustified belief that profit and growth can escalate untrammelled, that the lunch can actually be free. Hence the idiocy of sub-prime lending and the collapse of the US housing market, which triggered so much of the turmoil that has followed.
The third is the intersection of growing global demand for food and oil. There is already pressure on food production – but suddenly world oil and gas supplies have reached peak capacity, not in terms of what’s in the ground, but of how quickly it can be brought to market. The resulting focus on bio-fuels has taken much needed land out of food production, so we now have inflation in the price of both oil and food.

STRICKEN BY DROUGHT

Of course, as always, it is the poorest who suffer most. Not for nothing have various Asian countries placed restrictions on exports of food staples like rice.
Of course, the cruelty of chance is often heaped on hardship. Those whose lives are already precarious enough through poverty live in the parts of the earth most susceptible to storm and quake and war.
So it was, a fortnight ago in Burma, when the storm surge from Typhoon Nargis devastated the Irrawaddy delta. Burma is one of the world’s poorest countries and, under a ruthless military regime, is ill-equipped to respond. A natural disaster is turning into a man-made catastrophe before our eyes. By the time hunger and disease have had their way with the survivors, the final toll will surpass the global total for the tsunami of 2004.
Less than a week later, the earth gave a massive twitch deep under Sichuan in south-western China and tens of thousands, maybe even a hundred thousand, died. This too is a poor and overpopulated area and badly constructed buildings certainly contributed to the death toll. But at least the authorities have welcomed assistance and have mobilised the armed forces and reserves, many of whom are trained in responding to earthquakes.
Yet we can’t forget that China also suffered its worst blizzards earlier this year, and Australia has been stricken by drought and we’re due one pandemic or another… and… and…
Perhaps robotics and nanotechnology and cloud seeding will develop fast enough to save us from the worst of what looks set to come as we reach the (predictable) limits of food, water and energy resources and contend with the (unpredictable) consequences of storms and quakes and human stupidity. But friends, we seriously need these things very, very soon.
Even then, one can’t dodge the bolt that bears one’s own badge. Friends and colleagues buried the writer and columnist Nuala O’Faoláin in Dublin last week. She had been in flying form, writing, teaching and contributing to Irish radio and press on the American election process, until she was diagnosed with a particularly virulent form of cancer in February. She was gone by May.
Past months have also lost us Jimmy Faulkner, one of the very best Irish guitarists of the last generation, and Joe Dolan, a seminal figure in the folk and traditional music revival in Ireland.
Life is prec(ar)ious. We should live in the moment, not in the past or the future. After all, who really knows what’s coming?