This World

The timing of my alarm clock has been slightly out of sync for a few weeks now meaning that although it says 7am when the alarm goes off it�s clearly about 7am and 30 seconds because I always miss the first half of the first story on the news.

Last night I thought about re-setting the time before I went to bed, but it was cold and I was tired and it�s one of those annoying digital clocks where you have to go all the way around the twenty-four hours to re-set it and if you miss the correct time your have to go around again. And inevitably I miss the correct time at least the first couple of tries. So I left it with the fleeting thought that if something big happened in the world overnight I would miss the first description of it.

This morning I woke up partway into a story that involved references to deaths and bombing and it took another minute or so for the news reader to mention where this latest attack had taken place. It turned out Baghdad and Israel.

Because of where I live most major world events happen while I�m sleeping or around the time I�m going to bed, and the morning news is the first I hear of it. I�ve become increasingly used to waking up to another catastrophe in some part of the world which doesn�t seem so far away.

9/11, Bali and last night�s bombing of the UN in Baghdad all actually happened while I was still awake and casually watching Jay or Conan on cable and I went to bed none the wiser. Because I don�t have reception on the free-to-air channels whatever I�m watching usually isn�t interrupted with news flashes of those events and I wait until the morning to deal with the incidents. Frankly I appreciate the extra good night�s sleep that would otherwise be unlikely to happen.

But occasionally I go to bed with slight trepidation as to what I�ll wake up to given the way the world is. Last night was one of those. 40 or so people dead and hundreds injured.

I don�t have any particular personal connection to either Iraq or Israel other than I work with a lot of Jewish people and know, through them, a few people who live in Jerusalem and who have an amazingly pragmatic approach to getting on with life in that city. The Boss�s daughter is on a kibbutz in the Israeli countryside at the moment, to the continued concern of her parents.

I can see both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and rather than getting into the politics of it my overwhelming sense is just of the fruitless vicious circle of violence that goes on between them that seems impossible to stop for so many reasons. Whenever there�s another bombing or incursion I have an increasingly disturbed feeling that there�s no way for it to end. And that is distressing.

In relation to Iraq there has been a profound reaction here to the bombing of the UN building, which seems to have been growing throughout the day. In particular the death of Sergio Vieira de Mello has been felt in this part of the world as he was extremely well known, and obviously well liked, following his role in East Timor. Members of Parliament of all political persuasions have been paying tribute to him today with some particularly personal and clearly heartfelt statements that have been quite moving. And politicians are rarely able to move me.

It�s a scary world we live in at the moment. And while I do not discount the world-changing impact of 9/11, I don�t actually think the heightened degree of fear in the world outside the US comes so much from that one event as from the difference in the instant nature of the media in this day and age. The truth is that it�s always been a scary world. Horrible and senseless things happen on small and large scales in different parts of it every day and always have. We just didn�t hear about them and see footage of them instantly until the era of CNN and the internet.

I know that�s not a profound or particularly insightful observation. Perhaps its just that today I wanted to be wrong about my small fear of waking up to a new piece of senseless violence on the news. And the fact that I was right saddens me.

At the same time I�m glad that it does sadden me and that I have not yet developed an immunity to it.

Tomorrow, though, I�d like to wake up to a senseless debate about some local political point scoring issue. Please.