With all of the countless tragedies in our world, we tend to react to them most when they are “close to home.” So there has not been much reaction to the bad news that soldiers in Kyrgyzstan, a Central Asian former part of the Soviet Union, have killed more than 100 people and injured more than 1,500 in several days of clashes between Kyrgyz and Uzbek ethnic groups.
But then we are reminded of the classic words of John Donne, 1572-1631:
“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.”
You may recall that Ernest Hemingway borrowed Donne’s words for the title of Hemingway’s famous novel on the Spanish Civil War, “For Whom the Bell Tolls.”
There are, indeed, many terrible things in our troubled world — many close to home, many far away. But as Donne said, we all are “involved in mankind,” and for that reason, tragedy is to be lamented, no matter upon whom it may fall.