A line in the sand

 

Yesterday, when the temperature in my studio reached an unprecedented level of discomfort, I gave up trying to work and wondered off for a stroll along the cool sea-shore of Ventry Bay. Standing on the damp sand, slightly above the point where the final force of the waves were expended, I drew a line in the sand. I watched each wave creep toward the line before tumbling back, every other attempt a little higher than the last. I told myself that the line represented a divide, a partition between that which is acceptable in my life, upon which I stood, and that which I could not tolerate, the great unknown of the unfathomable. The deep won, remorseless, random, chaotic - it played a little first before gathering itself and unexpectedly threw a titanic wave obliterating my line and soaking my shoes.

 

Perhaps we all have such a line, drawn higher or lower, drawn against the rising tide of war and death that is taking over the world - behind which we stand. Until that mark is crossed we find ourselves still able to react at individual events. Still able to protest our outrage, boycott the produce and try to pretend that the tide won't rise, and each wave that falls back is in fact a victory spurring us on.

 

But there comes a day when the simple line is crossed. The world engulfs the individual.

 

The crimes against humanity are too many, too big and to fast to stand against and we lose our capacity to be shocked. For me it occurred when Israel ferociously attacked Lebanon, on the same day 10 were killed in Gaza and some 40 in Iraq with numerous dead in Afghanistan - they pooled with reports from across Africa of death and carnage, warlords and power struggles.

 

The line broke; the waves washed over me and when I could look down there was only the smooth sand. No artificial divide between my sanctified life of my personal morality and that of the greater horror that is the world's drive to profit, war and murder; in its place an uncharted canvas upon which a new morality may materialise, but I doubt it. I find myself not wanting read the papers and avoiding the news broadcasts. The paralysis of my conscience is not complete but the revulsion I felt for the world's leaders, American imperialism and Israeli hypocrisies is no longer neatly divided by a line in the sand.

 

Instead it merges with every day life.

 

It becomes one with the blank uncaring looks I see in restaurants as the already over fat people stuff themselves with food that, at the very least, should require several life times of penance to even begin to balance its lack of karma. It flows into a disgust at the massive 4x4 semi trucks that have become a family car. It reviles against the soulless concrete monstrosities of the holiday homes that are destroying my hills and valleys, shudders at the human slavery encumberant in this laptop and breaks down in tears over a seagull trapped in a plastic beer can loop.

 

Like a river that has burst its banks it fills and floods and enters each crack in the rose tinted world dream that I once held, a world where things were basically all right if only this could be done or that changed.

 

It is no longer so. The line has been breeched.

 

The pain has illuminated and joined all the dots and my picture is total. A leviathan force is shaking our world and we are at its mercy it has a name: global warming, global pollution, global extinction, global warfare, global pandemics - globalisation - it has a myriad more tentacles that medusa and carries a far more deadly a poison. Those of us who still hold the line, walk the line and, quite rightly, it takes up all our energies. Perhaps once it has gone a new synthesis of change can emerge and conceivably the conflicts that obsess us now can appear to be as old and as stupid as those that once called my father to drop bombs on another European country.