I have to admit, I was actually really sad when I heard that Knut, the Berlin Zoo's beloved celebrity polar bear, died suddenly and unexpectedly at the age of just four. (This was two weeks ago now.) Then, just before I went to bed the same night, I checked the news and found out we were bombing Libya. Oh. Kind of puts things in perspective, I suppose.
It's definitely a strange time - that night (the Knut-is-dead-and-war-in-Libya night) one person said, with so much of the Middle East collapsing into civil war, and tsunamis and the nuclear disaster in Japan, and polar bears dropping dead...it almost makes you start to believe all that 2012 world-is-going-to-end stuff.
Another person said, Well, but in every era like this, people living through it must have felt like the world was surely ending - and yet it didn't.
It's a strange, small comfort, at least.
Meanwhile, while we're on depressing topics - I recently translated an article about how the West has been selling weapons for years to Libya, Yemen, etc. (A brilliant idea, clearly.)
As I was doing that translation, I had to remind myself not to fall into the trap of the too-literal translation: in this case, "Rüstungsindustrie," which literally comes out to "armaments/weapons industry," but in fact in English the standard term is "defense industry."
And it was only then that it occurred to me: How weird is that, that we use the words "defense industry" for the business of making weapons? That's a euphemism if I ever heard one.
Oh, and one more thing on the topic: I stumbled across this page, where the New York Times aggregates its latest news from various Middle Eastern countries that are experiencing unrest. A good all-in-one-place resource for those of us who aren't as well-informed as we wish we were.
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