Houston We Have A Problem

Individual tragedy resists imagination; collective tragedy boggles it; tragedy, as it is reported on the news, completely banalizes it. I would argue that no matter the level of emergency relief offered to Texas, no matter the response by charities and relief organizations — we (those who are elsewhere, safe) will never be able to comprehend the tragedy other than as a species of news-tragedy; sensational tragedy. From a bird’s eye view, Houston, Katrina, Fukushima, and many other ecological events are part of a single tragedy; the breakdown of harmony between human beings and the natural world — the fever earth has generated in order to rid itself of the dangerous human pest. This we never see — we never see the whole woof; only the individual thread. What’s happening in Texas is a massive ecological disaster, with cascading effects; a chain-effect, dominoes — just like Katrina was. It — the disaster — is a product not just of climate change, but over-population, urban-sprawl, social disintegration, poverty, the destruction of wetlands. The complexity, the delicacy, the holistic nature of these events is never reported, and thus never calculated; never culturally internalized. We — again: we who are on the outside, safe — experience a flood of Biblical proportions as a story; almost like a sporting event. We read about lives saved, lives lost; stories of heroism — we read the President’s faux-heroic Tweets… but we do not comprehend what we’re actually seeing (digitally on screens). We don’t see the chains of causality; the antagonisms between human development and nature; between…