Beauty, death and the inexpicable

Beauty is everywhere, just as is death.

The rose is for many a
 symbol of beauty, but equally
linked to death.

Interestingly, and paradoxically, I’m midway through reading a book about beauty and a rash of deaths have impacted on my life.

Death has a perverse beauty, but that is conditional, the caveat being that the exit must be timely; death should be the culmination of a life well-lived, or at least on that allowed for the realization of the person’s hopes and dreams.

Anything sooner than that leaves us with a hollowness, an uncertainty and the nagging question of why?

Of course the technicalities of why can easily be answered, but there are grander implications that arouse confusion and mystery when the death appears untimely.

Humanity broadly understands, and so generally accepts, that death awaits us all, rather patiently, at the end of a well-lived life.

We become confused and the mystery of why only deepens when the imagined scythe-wielding reaper appears early in someone’s life, gives a somewhat sickly smile as our friends depart with a rush we are unable to understand.

This recent rash of deaths began with the expected, but early, death of friend in her 60s – expected as it was, she had time to hand paint her own coffin.

Next it was Jill Meagher, someone I obviously didn’t know, but like many others, the television images of her final moments were etched in my mind making the connection with that young woman strangely real.

Recently, the “reaper” swooped by, much closer.

Lunch with a friend a few weeks back on a Friday was followed the next morning by a relatively innocuous accident that was to take his life a few days later.

He wasn’t ready to go as he had much to do and it was only at that Friday lunch he had talked about statistically having another twenty healthy years to live. He was alive with enthusiasm.

Even more difficult to understand was the death last week of a 28-year-old workmate who had undergone an operation to further repair damage to a leg injured in a road accident nearly two decades ago.

She was young, married and along with her husband was building a life together, but on Friday all the hopes and dreams fell into ruin.

This seemingly nonsensical conclusion to well-lived lives causes us to again wonder why bad things happen to good people.

Searching for answers, I quizzed a Christian friend, whose beliefs are the antithesis of mine, but he provided little comfort, adding only that it was an age-old question.

Struggling with the vacuum that is death we can do little, it seems, but fill the bizarre and confusing nothingness with reassuring and comforting images and memories of that person’s innate beauty, the warmth of their engaging smile and their generousity.

 

Speed and road deaths inextricably linked

Death will occur in less than second in a serious road collision.

The image used by Victoria's
 Transport Accident Commission
 to encourage a reduction
in speeds.

The speed at which a person dies as their car crumples is alarming with the sequence of events that kill being explained at a Shepparton “Cool Heads” program last year.

Death arrives at a speed that exceeds human response and although its finality is catastrophic, further complexities for occupants arise when one or more are injured, severely or otherwise, and often subsequently left with devastating life-long disabilities.

The collisions are the outcome of fatigue, inexperience, inattention, stupidity, vehicle failure and, contrary to the view of a recent correspondent to this newspaper, speed.

Even the slowest of us should be able to deduce that speed – a statistically confirmed fact in the causation of road collisions – is the product of fatigue, inexperience, inattention and, most certainly, stupidity.

A motor vehicle, again it should be clear to even the dullest of us, is a heartless immobile contrivance that awaits human input and reacts to simple instructions many of which may well come from one who is tired, inexperienced, inattentive and beyond and within all that, stupid.

Therein lies a recipe for almost certain disaster, for with stupidity in control, seasoned by inexperience, inattention and fatigue, this heartless metal contrivance is taken to  speeds beyond the abilities of whoever is in charge and, of course, those of the vehicle.

Evidence explaining events leading up to road collisions are the same the world over and so it is common to read such things as: “When the facts are truthfully presented, however, the behavior of the implicated driver is usually the primary cause. Most collisions result from excessive speed or aggressive driver behavior.”

That evidence is easily found as most internet search engines will, almost as quick as you can die in a road collision, find confirmation of collision causes and without doubt will list speed as being among the prime instigators.

Gustave Flaubert

Victoria’s Transport Accident Commission is the reservoir into which the residue from the state’s road collisions collect and being acutely aware of the role speed plays as it stalks our roads, the Commission has worked tirelessly to reduce such stupidity. 

It understands how speed increases the likelihood of collisions, but faces implacable opponents who, should something go wrong because of their arrogance, ignorance or stupidity, find perverse comfort in attributing responsibility to conditions, others, vehicle failure and just about any variable, except themselves, and certainly not the fact that they drove above the applicable speed limit.

French author, Gustave Flaubert, lived and worked before motor cars existed, but seemed prescient when he said: “To be stupid, selfish and have good health are the three requirements of happiness. Though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.”

Jodie's death ricochets around my head and leaves me at a loss for words

Friday’s death of Jodie Ridges has ricocheted around my head since hearing of it on Monday.
Sitting to write, I am at a loss for words and talking with others seemed little help as most just shook their heads in sadness and dismay muttering things about “what a tragedy”.
That gut response from people epitomizes how they feel when someone is seemingly pointlessly wrenched from our community and a hollow sense of all that arises when confronted with the fragility of life.
Jodie, 38, was injured in March last year when cycling on the Midland Highway, just west of Mooroopna, when hit by a car at the Turnbull Rd intersection.
The driver of the car, who was technically unlicenced, was sentenced to a month’s jail, suspended for a year and ordered to pay $10 000 to the Scott Peoples Foundation, a body set up following the death of promising Shepparton cyclist, Scott Peoples, who died in 2006 when also struck by a car.
The foundation was nominated by the Ridges family.
Jodie and I never meet, but the mother of four and I do have, or had, some similarities.
A road accident in December ’97 left me with a brain injury, and other difficulties and I too ride a bicycle.
Those two similarities seem unimportant compared to the overarching likeness – we both lived with hopes, dreams and ambitions; we, before Jodie’s death, were both compatriots in this great experiment called life.
My life was punctuated only by a semi-colon; Jodie’s, sadly, by a full stop.
It is about here that the words begin to evaporate and people, particularly men, turn to why and use reasoning in an attempt to fill the void in their understanding of such a wasteful death.
Women appear more willing to engage with the whole experience and within that work to psychologically understand the dynamics of death or injury, while men in a much rougher male approach simply want to eradicate the difficulty and return things to the way they were.
That said, many men can, however, be equally empathetic, but by tradition they tend to steer away from anything that might be somewhat emotional or, in colloquial terms, a little “touchy, feely”.
Life is loaded with heroics and while trained soldiers, firemen, police officers or even the likes of solo sailor, Jessica Watson, are not heroes, rather well-prepared people who take risks,  I do consider that of those who unknowingly and unwillingly confront the difficulties that life thrusts at them.
Jodie’s husband, Scott, and their four children have had heroism hurled at them and unlike the solitary heroes in the movies, don’t let them stand alone, be their friend and in any practical way you can, help them piece their lives back together.

Death saddens, while blatant nationalism frightens me



Dead - Osama bin Laden

The reported death last week of Osama bin Laden saddened me.
That moment, celebrated by many Americans, including President Barack Obama, simply revealed a nationalistic fervour that can erode and corrupt even the most decent of societies.
Many would argue that the demise of bin Laden was justified retribution for the nearly 3000 people killed in 2001 when New York’s World Trade Centres were destroyed, an event for which he was credited.
bin Laden’s Al Qaeda organization claimed responsibility for many other deadly attacks and so some would see his killing as only a down payment on the growing debt brought upon himself by his deathly antics.
Accepting that he, or at least his organization, was responsible for what is known colloquially as 9/11, that desperate moment is not put right through the murder of the 54-year-old Saudi.
Many Americans, and an equal number of other people from around the world, undoubtedly see such a conclusion to a US operation in a mansion just outside Pakistan's capital, Islamabad, quite differently.
Reported on the ABC the day of bin Laden’s death, President Obama said: "Tonight is a testament to the greatness of our country... we are reminded that America can do whatever we set our minds to."
Such comments do little but add to the poison that is nationalism and excite the less than expansive minds of those simply want to bomb into oblivion countries that don’t want to accept the “gift” of Americanism.
The world is s knotty place and within that complexity is an endless array of phobias, seemingly pointless obsessions and considered insanities that ensure every action has many unintended consequences.
That being said, many drink to bin Laden’s demise, while an equal number, who see his demise through a different prism, consider how best they can revenge his death and so the outcome of last week’s raid was not a solution, rather just the opening gambit in those unintended consequences.
Those who went before us have not had the emotional capacity to see beyond the immediate and so reacted with disingenuous behaviour and so despite the loud and repeated pleas for peace, the world ended up simply ricocheting from one violent encounter to another.
It is time humanity took a deep, deep breath, stood back and acknowledged that few of our number understand what peace means, how it is achieved, how we live with it, where it begins, what role each of us has and the brute stupidity of killing another in the name of values important to us, is just that, less than intelligent.
The challenge for each is immense; we need excavate our stoicism rather than nationalism and apply the Christian doctrine of turn the other cheek.

$20 billion to maintain our overseas aggression - Why?

Armed with all the destructive technology available, or more correctly what we can afford to buy from the state supported military-industrial complex; our politicians roam the world looking for a fight.

Look hard enough and, of course, you will find one and we claim that the subsequent violence is honourable, moral and in the greater good, whatever the cost, be it in the obscene amount of money it costs or the death and momentous disruption caused to the lives of others.
Our overseas troop commitments, primarily in Afghanistan are, according to recent figures, costing us, that is you and I, people who are raising kids, attending church, working, enjoying a beer and sunny days in the park, nearly $2 billion a year to maintain our rage.
Australians have been in Afghanistan for more than a decade and simple arithmetic puts the cost, at present value, at $20 billion, an amount that makes any major public and civilian project here seem like small change.
Applying different values our alternative energy systems could be stunning, our train network brilliant, our education life-changing, health services spectacular and poverty eradicated.
The thought of the disarray we have wrought upon another culture through force in the name of the greater good sees me reach for the anti-depression medication.
A decade of confrontation in those distant countries sees the maintenance of a mentality solidified after a life soaked in violence that is embedded in our psyche during teenage years spent watching aggressive movies, television shows, computer games and then, later, surviving in today’s competitive commercial milieu.
Ask those you next meet about Australian values and you will probably hear about such things as “fair dinkum”, “mateship”, “honesty”, ‘’friendship” and “giving people a fair go”.
All honourable and worthwhile attributes, but after a decade of plunder, and death in another country’s culture they are somewhat transparent leaving us entrenched in a disagreement that has mutated into something we no longer understand.
Supporters of the conflict, trapped by politics, pride and militant personalities, want us to stay the distance – I ask how far? At what cost? And, critically, why?