I'm going to be honest I don't know. No one does, really. But I suppose we owe it to ourselves to at least attempt to answer that question.
We've all heard the starfish story hundreds washed up on a shore and an earnest little girl who flings them, one by one, back into the ocean. 'What's the point?' a cynic sneers, 'You'll never be able to save all of them.' Oh, but that's okay, she says, 'I made a difference to that one, right there. And that one. And that one.'
Right now, it's difficult not to be cynical. 152 citizens we lost, in 'one fell swoop' to the airplane crash—seems tragically large a figure. 1,600—the number fallen to floods at the time of writing—is even higher. The thought of s-e-v-e-n-t-e-e-n m-i-l-l-i-o-n affected by the deluge—can you get your head around that?
When flight ED202 plunged to its end in the Margalla Hills, my reaction was one of acute sorrow. The girl in my A-level literature class who ardently argued the merits of women's cricket during 'breaks' was no more. My fellow debate team member, who raced luggage trolleys up and down the streets of LUMS, guffawing in that typically hearty way that she had—she too was no more. These were relatively personal losses but they were also losses for the country. Lives with such staggering potential, cut short so abrubtly, tragically. No one will ever know for sure why that plane crashed but if the current, literal ocean of 17 million flood affectees is left to fester, we will have no one to blame but ourselves. Deaths that can be prevented must be prevented—to do otherwise would be a stinging slap in the face of all those whose loss we lamented just two weeks ago. And let's be honest it's about time we learnt that if we want something done, we're going to have to do it ourselves. Countries are run not by the ones who think they can run them but by the ones who, at the end of the day, show up. We need to begin showing up.
When numbers spill over into the territory of thousands and millions, exceeding the scope of most ordinary imaginations, it is much too easy —natural, also—to succumb to either apathy or despair. It's best, at that point, to think not big but small, to become that little starfish-clutching girl. How else will we muster up the strength to do anything at all?
That sack of wheat—we must remind ourselves that it made a difference to that one family there; those water-purification tablets—they saved that fistful of lives in that village over there. If enough care and effort is put into reconstruction, we must remember, those saved lives might one day be cricketers in the making, national-level debaters too.
And maybe, eventually, one by one, a sack of wheat, a medical kit at a time, we'll have put it all back together, this heap of affected lives, this impossible heap.
