cat /proc/claus

This news from the Asahi shinbun, kinda blew my mind. Apparently, an year ago a girl commited Suicide in Hokkaido due to extreme bullying in school. The point, here, is that the girl was 6 years old.

Yes, it is some horrible news, yes it is shocking. Yup, that’s a pity. But this is not what I wanted to talk about.

I always had this idea that the concept of death was one that developed later in one’s mental development. I can’t remember the exact numbers, but children up to a certain age were not supposed to be able to understand the concept of death because they lacked some abstracts constructs needed for this concept.

I wish I had paid more attention to my Piaget now.

So I wonder how this 6 year old could have killed herself - maybe she was mimicking something she saw in the adult world? Maybe I’m wrong about the age when the concept of death develops?

Any insights?

Ah, BTW, sorry, but the news link above is only in japanese. I tried googling for an english link without success.

Recently my mother posted about hurting people without noticing. This week, I did just that thing. An action that I thought would be a minor offence became the last straw that broke the camel’s back.

Whee. Way to start the week.

After the rain was gone, even the summerclouds had left that hot afternoon. Something was amiss. But in such a bright, fine day, you cannot be disturbed by such such small things.

Nature has small treasures that for a while can seem like the biggest thing in the whole world. It is strange to feel, though, that after the rain is gone, it can wash away even pleasant clouds in the distant horizon.

Every friday, I have these classes where the teacher grabs many newspaper articles about different subjects, and then comment on them. Yesterday he was reading one that mentioned that Japan is the country with the highest percentage of people over 65 years in its population, and also the country with the lowest percentage of people under 15 years.

Then he noticed that in both “Top 5″ tables were also Germany and Italy. His commentary was inevitable “the countries that lost the war”.

Now, a very interesting discussion could follow about wether the two facts are connected or not, and to what degree. But that wasn’t what came to my mind at the moment.

If you stay for any length of time in Japan, you’ll come across people who use the “japan is the country that lost the war” as an excuse to a series of things, positive, negative or trivial. For these people, “Country which lost the war” is sometimes admitted with a kind of “damn we were caught” shame, or with a grim pride, but nonetheless consideret to be part of their japanese identity, as if the second world war was something which affected them as directly as it affected Togo (the effective chief of state of japan during WWII). And thus, something that has influence in almost all aspects of contemporary Japan.

On the other hand, it seems to be exactly the opposite in current Germany. Althought I hadn’t experienced it first hand, it seems to be common knowledge that the easiest way to anger a german is to draw lines between german and nazis, or between germany and the third Reich. Nazi propaganda and denial of the holocaust are censored and outlawed there (iirc). In short, is as if the germans want to put a stone over their past, and say to all the world that current germany and WWII germany are two absolutely different countries, which happen to share nothing but their geographical location. (This is the image that I have).

Now, a very interesting discussion could follow about these two instances, why the two countries have such different attitudes toward their past, and which one is more appropriate (if either). But that’s not where my thought flowed to next.

What about Italy? I mean, whenever I think about second world war’s axis powers, Germany or Japan spring immediately to mind, with mussolini coming as a distant third. And while the first two countries have obvious past issues, does Italy have any WWII axis power issues? I can’t remember hearing of any, and in fact the reverse link Italy -> WWII Axis seems unlikely to come up spontaneously. Why is it so?

I tried looking a little into wikipedia, but besides lots of US and USSR bashing, couldn’t find much. Interesting. I wonder if someone raised in the EU would have a different point of view.

If you have ever been to those seminars about proactivity and other useless dilbert-esque keywords (or “the secret of happiness”, or “who moved my cheese”, or whatever). You have certainly heard this phrase, and must already have an idea on what this means - that no one can live by oneself, people need other people, yadda, yadda, yadda. It got to the point that whenever someone said “No man is an island”, I would reach for my revolver…

You must also have heard “Don’t ask for whom the bells toll, they toll for you”. And most probably you must think this quote to be quite moody, dark, or ominous. The undertone is always that every man is mortal, that you too are going to die, etc, etc. I think the Joker used it on a Batman story. Also this phrase was way down in my respect list, in company of most The Matrix quotes.

Well, it turns out that both these phrases have the above meanings only when completely out of context. I was quite surprised to find out that they were part of the same poem, and were used to pass the one same idea, an idea completely different from the two ideas above. Much more prosaic and, from my point of view, much more agreeable.

The poem is reproduced below, it is from John Donne, XVI century, and the general meaning, from what I could understand, is that no life is meaningless, and every man has his value in humanity. And just that.

I think I can now kill the next person who says “No man is an island”, in a motivational speech without much remorse.

“No man is an island, entire of itself
every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.
if a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were,
as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were.
any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind
and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls
it tolls for thee. “

– John Donne