The Fleeting Nature of Things.

This isn't a rant. It's not an opinionated diatribe. It's not even a didactic moral stance. It's more an observation. An observation about the fleeting, transient, ephemeral nature of things.

Over the last few days certain events and developments, both personal and external to me, have caused this idea to galvanise in my mind. I'm not trying to make some deep philosophical statement here. It's quite a simple concept but forgotten by most of us in the privileged nations in a heartbeat. Perhaps some people never ever come to realise it. But this isn't about them.

Haitians realise it. Like so many other of the underpriviliged nations they have a constant notion of the fleeting state of things, being as they are the poorest (and recently the most unluckiest) nation in the western hemisphere. There day to day life must be a futile struggle to forget, to erase, to block out the reality of their lot in this life until it hits them at magnitude 7 on the Richter Scale.

How easily and indefinitely can we in the west manage to continue unabated in the blissful ignorance that everything will be ok because as far as we can remember it always has been. But its not is it. Just ask anyone who remembers the Second World War and they'll tell you how quickly it can all come crashing down... even here in the western world. No one is immune from the catastrophic fleeting nature of things. All edifices can crumble, even those built on wealth and ignorance as we have already seen recently.

Perhaps it is the ironic fate of free market capitalism that it will not be able to realise and act upon its own impending doom in time to save itself, such is the comforting blanket of apathy it has created for its subjects. Someone (I forget who but it may have been Naomi Kline) once remarked that Consumerism is the single most dangerous concept ever propogated in the history of mankind. I couldn't agree more and it's had some stiff opposition over the centuries. For in our maddening bubbles of playstations and wi's, designer shirts and shoes, fast cars and fast food, Jermey Clarksons and Piers Morgans, we forget how much is at stake and how quickly modern industry is allowing us to rip it all down. The opacity level of our bubble increases daily and we slowly start to forget how fleeting everything is, despite the tendrils of communication now linking us up more effectively to the world around us than we ever thought possible. This paradox goes to the heart of what is fundamentally wrong with modern free market capitalism: the more comfortable people become, the more isolated they are from the wider reality. Political apathy and the rise of the celebrity culture is only one symptom of this malaise.

And so as we grow ever more immune to the fleeting nature of things, such as the everlasting supply of electricity, water, heat, food under the current industrial model, we stumble unprecariously closer towards, what some commentators and scientists are already calling, "the perfect storm" (that is global warming combined with massively increasing population, decreasing food production capacity water supply). It is a telling sign that many in the know are already referring to water as the "blue gold" of the next century.

Haitians and millions upon millions of other people living in poverty and fear all over the world don't have the luxury of unpolluted blue gold at the moment, as the UN and NGO's struggle to get it distributed in the stricken capital Port-au-Prince. They also don't have the luxury of our superdry, superfly consumer bubbles to protect them from the terrible knowledge of how transient life can be.

It is all they can do to survive in Haiti right now but after the media attention has waned it will be all they can do to forget about how quickly it could all come down again. Perhaps, from the warm centrally heated safety of our opaque consumer bubbles, it is now our duty to do the opposite and start to realise that in an instant, all of what we hold dear could be gone too. Because if we in the priviliged nations can't, then there will be no coming back.