The Thin Ice of Civilization

Yep this is a sheer paraphrase of Pink Floyd, but it so applies to our world today.

How thick do you think is the varnish of civilization that covers the true misery of human existence?

Several centuries of so-called humanism have left us with pink-glass shades that drive most of us in a true denial of our inner nature and an hopeless faith in humanity.

How much is this humanity worth in Iraq's bloodbath or Louisiana's flood? The value of humanity is not 6 billion times the value of a single human being: it is equal to the very value granted to single human life.

Break the thin ice of civilization and you discover this value...

The Land of Disappointment

A few weeks ago, I was back from the US and readers of this blog surely have noticed my enthusiastic and exhilarated pro-American post named "A land of Possibilities". Now, hurricane Katrina came, devastated New Orleans, took many lives and left me with some disappointment (I recognize that the latter is definitively of no importance!).

Let me express this disappointment with questions:

• How come a country that can mobilize so much energy to achieve so many harsh and complex endeavors, as it regularly does, can be so grossly mismanaging such a natural disaster?
  
  
• How come, when it was about putting off an imaginary threat in a remote country, no human life nor billion of dollars have been spared ; and when it is about dealing with a genuine imminent menace, so few has been done?

Well, may be because, after all, disappointment is also a possibility...