April 21st, 2019: Loss

[xoxoxoBruce]

If you aren’t aware of the fire at Notre Dame last Monday night, how the hell are you getting internet under that rock?
The reactions have ranged from hair cutting and sack cloth, to animated rage/sorrow/both, to Ha Ha French bitches.

This linusrowe Tumbler was brought to my attention...

To me, some of the responses to the Notre-Dame fire seemed very short-sighted. It’s neither the end of the world nor something to be celebrated. I was listening to two Syrian men being interviewed about the destruction in their country, and they said ‘it’s controversial, you could see it as selfish to look at the loss of some stones and not the loss of people - but it’s still a sadness.’

It’s a kind of regret, it’s not the same grief as when people die. The feeling of sadness is even greater when you realize the country has not been only losing its future, but also a significant part of its past.’

It’s ok to feel grief and loss when a part of a people’s history and shared heritage is lost, and I don’t really think it’s excusable to mock anyone who mourns these events, or celebrate them happening because of the wrongs that have been committed, historically and in modernity, by some social or political elements of the same society. That kind of black and white thinking plays exactly into the same repeating narrative of retribution, blame and further loss.

In light of what I have heard and read the past few days, good and bad, I have made a post to highlight some of the other lost, ransacked, gutted, broken buildings and monuments, great and small, from other cultures across the world.

Speaking of the Dresden Frauenkirche, after the fire-bombing of WW II Dresden was like a wasteland. My father was in Germany
with the 82nd Airborne at the end of the war and mentioned he was impressed with the people who were out with shovels and
brooms trying to clean up some of the rubble. At first they said didn't have the money to fix the Frauenkirche, but would leave the
ruins as a war memorial ... of course the commies aren’t big on churches anyway.



But in 1992 they got permission to restore the church as a symbol of the reunification of Germany. Work started in 1994
and finished in 2005, costing about 200 million dollars.



So fear not for Notre Dame, they had already collected pledges of over a Billion dollars by Thursday. It’ll be back.