Empathy

The news from Queensland has not been good for the past two weeks or more, with serious and extensive floods in Central Queensland, effectively trashing a major agricultural region while also bringing to a halt the mining and export of around 25% of the world's coking coal. Terrible and disastrous as these floods have been -- and in fact, they are still covering huge areas of the state -- the most recent floods in Toowoomba and now in Ipswich and Brisbane have hit a vein of empathy prompted by few other natural catastrophes. Why?

Undoubtedly it is because I know people involved, have managed to Skype one friend near Toowoomba (in the misnamed Highfields -- height has not proved to be a protection against these floods), and have had a very affecting e-mail from friends in an outer suburb of Brisbane saying that they have had to take refuge in a nearby church (presumably a designated refuge centre) as their house is threatened with being engulfed by the flood when it peaks on Thursday.

This news has had a very unsettling effect because it is only recently that I was staying with or visiting the friends involved, and was passing through the areas and the town -- Toowoomba -- where the flash floods have occurred with such terrible effect. I know the house which has been flooded in Highfields, and to which our friend only shifted from Brisbane a few months before, and in November, I was staying with the friends now in the flood refuge. Their house. while near the Brisbane River, had always seemed to me to be comfortably above river level, which was many feet below the riverside ramble which I occasionally took while staying there. In fact, it now transpires that the flood level is so enormously above the levels I have observed in happier times that it is virtually impossible to comprehend the scale of it. Except that I know that if it really does hit the 25 metres or so above normal that is predicted. my friends' house will surely be flooded.

And I am aghast at the prospect of trying to cope. How to remove precious belongings and. what is even more pressing, where to store them safely? How to handle the prospect of sitting helplessly by while one's house is trashed by the overwhelming force of the flood? And how to consider the prospect of having to re-establish normal life again?

So, with a first hand knowledge of the areas being flooded, and with a stake in the safety and well being of friends, a deeper seam of empathy has been mined than has emerged in response to equally or more tragic disasters -- the Haiti earthquake is one that comes to mind. I suppose it demonstrates how significant -- even vital -- personal experience and affection are in discovering a capacity for empathy and sympathy with the victims of these events. Not, really, an uplifting discovery, but, a sadly pragmatic one. Meanwhile, we monitor the news with anxiety -- and empathy.