The historical disasters

History holds quite a few disasters. Wars, plauges, earthquakes, revolutions, tsunamies and social outcastness. Not forgetting something like the Titanic. To stick to that for an example for a bit. How long does the disasterness last? It's really sad all those people died, but by now they would all have been dead anyway. World war 2 is heading the same way, I suppose. Can it only remain a disaster while people are still around to carry on the legacy of it's horrors? In a way I think so. We can read about the black death wiping out a big part of the population, but without eyewitnesses it's kind of a dead story. A bit almost like a fairytale. Only to be remembered by words. Also the world was a very different place back then. That makes it even harder for us to relate to them. I have no direct relationship with any of these things. My life has been pretty safe when it comes to historical disasters, they haven't bothered me.

How does this relate to personal matters. Perhaps I let strange things bother me because I always get stuck in my own perspective. I haven't experianced wars. Not even any really nature disasters. Just a few storms with power black outs for a couple of weeks. Really no biggie if you compare. To me the personal disasters are the disasters. In a way I don't think it differs that much from the bigger picture. Even world war 2 was such a historical disaster because it consisted of a lot of personal ones. Every loved one taken away. That's something we can all relate to. It's only the way they went that differs really. The uncertainty of where life is heading might have been a bit overwhelming at times, but then again, there's safety in numbers right? Maybe it felt a bit better if you knew millions of other people were in the same shitsituation as you, you wouldn't feel so lonley.

It kind of reminds me of that book by Camus, The Plauge where one of the characters is concidering suicide before the town gets sick, and well, when they're all sick he finds some kind of peace of mind. Like they're all sharing his misery and that makes it easier to bear. I think that's why humanity keeps coming back and surviving these things. We do it together, we share the misery and we fight together to find a way forward how much we hurt individually.

In that context it's easier to understand the peaks of depression in a general population. When a society is doing well and things are good it's a double curse to be sad and empty. You don't have a place in that and you stick out even more. Karin Johannisson writes in her book Melakoliska rum that melancholy is a lack. Perhaps in a healthy society the lack that causes melancholy is a sense of belonging and being made abundant by the world you live in. Not saying that's the whole cause of it, and it also raises the question of what came first the melancholy or the sense of not belonging. I'm hardly qualified to answer that question! Though I think it's safe to say that there is a connection between mental unhealth and a lower position in society, shown for example as unemployment and/or lack of funds.

Will we look at the starvation in Africa the same way? A chance for the planet to get caught up and a new level to exist on. I doubt people 500 years from now will have a problem with that, no more than I have with villages being taken over by nature because all the inhabitants died in a disease I'll never risk contracting.

Perhaps it's a simple human need to have disasters. If they don't happen to us on a grander scale we create our own. Yeah, I really think so