![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Today, I met a lady from Afghanistan. She was dressed in elegant clothes, and looked nothing like the refugees you see on television, or the noseless and earless women mutilated by the Taliban. Her family had fled the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and so she had escaped the Taliban and the current conflict.
This lady told me about how wonderful it was to grow up in Kabul, how beautiful and pure the land and water were, and how she wore Western clothes and grew to young womanhood. Then I heard such sadness in her voice when she spoke of what Afghanistan has become. She spoke with bitterness about the fanatics and the ruin of her country. "It will be one hundred years before Afghanistan recovers," she told me.
All day I thought about this lady, and how the Afghanistan she knew exists now only in her memories. The world around us is so fragile -- there is really no 'of course' about anything. I am still haunted, years later, by Hurricane Katrina; I do not know if I could've handled losing my entire world as she did.
Jared Diamond, in his Guns, Germs, and Steel talks about the Norse settlers of Greenland, a historical footnote to most people, easily dismissed as a failed experiement. And yet he pointed out that the Greenlandic Norse lasted 600 years, much longer than my own newborn nation of America has survived so far. There are so many other vanished civilizations -- the Hephtalite Empire, the Khazars, the Hittites -- and others even more obscure, of which all that may remain are some gene frequencies and possibly scraps of their languages, if we're lucky. And yet untold numbers of people were born and died in these vanished cultures, living their entire lives immersed in it, singing forgotten songs and praying to gods we do not know the names of. Then there are the others still hanging on by their fingernails, such as the Burushaski and the Andaman Islanders, who may disappear before my time on this planet is done.
This lady told me about how wonderful it was to grow up in Kabul, how beautiful and pure the land and water were, and how she wore Western clothes and grew to young womanhood. Then I heard such sadness in her voice when she spoke of what Afghanistan has become. She spoke with bitterness about the fanatics and the ruin of her country. "It will be one hundred years before Afghanistan recovers," she told me.
All day I thought about this lady, and how the Afghanistan she knew exists now only in her memories. The world around us is so fragile -- there is really no 'of course' about anything. I am still haunted, years later, by Hurricane Katrina; I do not know if I could've handled losing my entire world as she did.
Jared Diamond, in his Guns, Germs, and Steel talks about the Norse settlers of Greenland, a historical footnote to most people, easily dismissed as a failed experiement. And yet he pointed out that the Greenlandic Norse lasted 600 years, much longer than my own newborn nation of America has survived so far. There are so many other vanished civilizations -- the Hephtalite Empire, the Khazars, the Hittites -- and others even more obscure, of which all that may remain are some gene frequencies and possibly scraps of their languages, if we're lucky. And yet untold numbers of people were born and died in these vanished cultures, living their entire lives immersed in it, singing forgotten songs and praying to gods we do not know the names of. Then there are the others still hanging on by their fingernails, such as the Burushaski and the Andaman Islanders, who may disappear before my time on this planet is done.
