Rescue Remedy
When horror hits home
I remember the first time I read somewhere that climate change disaster is about watching the horrors of its creeping doom, through progessively smaller and smaller screens, until finally one awful day you are filming it yourself. It strikes me that all manner of modern day atrocity is the same now, one day smashing uninvited into your neighbourhood and shifting beloved local landscapes forever.
Horror always echoes with not here, not now, not us because the truth is that no one anywhere ever deserves the very worst of our inhumanity. In the face of it we are stunned, rendered mute and helpless, desperately in need in safety and support. This is the universal human experience. There but for the grace of what exactly? Now until it actually happens somewhere adjacent and claims its unwelcome place in life experience, the degree of separation from empathy is the greatest distance not travelled. You can hear it in the hollow shock, shaking voices and shattering norms. Dissonance that dissolves acrid supposition like an acid. Arms length criticism and its staggering lack of compassion also eliminated in an instant. Yesterday’s shockwave travelling across the city’s sunset skyline like nuclear fallout.
In the earliest howls of shock and cawing that accompany atrocity this is not who who we are quickly now becomes who they are, because what cannot be explained hunts for reason in madness and certainty in the face of unimaginable trauma and grief. It was one thing to bear witness in real time as horror hit home. But then an awful other thing to watch Australian legacy media assigning motive and blame without a shred of evidence beyond their shareholder bias. Fresh faced reporters on the ground struggling to stay in integrity to an unfolding story. We all heard inexplicably from a PM on another continent on the other side of the world long before the one that Australians voted into the job, which reeks of things that make you go hmmm. Journalism is not what it once was in the age of first-make-the-post news. No wonder the terms to describe unknown people now, like actors or NPCs, reflect character and archetype rather than actual identity, the multitudinal truth of an real human being. Broad brushstrokes that hide the truth in their streaks.
We have had degrees of separation inserted by design somewhere in the yawning chasm between our humanity and our short attention span. We all know how it happened. We all know where. We just did not think it had already happened to us. Only them, right? Fools and liars, the stupid stinking unthinking lot of us. Unwittingly all in this together and realising it far too slowly still.
The wake of atrocity is smoky for days and nothing is ever as it first seems. Confusion is a tactic. Urgency forces fallout. Perhaps most galling of all grief is always weaponised. Marginalised and potentised, because the grifters and psychpaths that have ruined our world know that outrage is the most valuable world currency. That division delivers the spoils. That fingerpointing obscures absolution. That none of it matters at all in the face of horrendous loss and horror.
And truly, sadly, deeply this is where we all live, now.
My heart long gone out to my city, all of us in shock. Most especially to my Bondi friends old and new, we’ve got you.
Kerrie xo
Rescue Remedy Sessions on offer all week, reach out if you need one.
Dark Mooner details here if you are in need of circle.
Regular end of year flip readings resume at the new moon this weekend. Until then and no doubt beyond, we are deep in this darkness.