Sometimes, I can see myself living in a sort of bubble. Not just me, actually, but all the other programmers around me, at my job. It’s like we’re living in a cocoon. Nothing can touch us. The day’s events usually all occur far away from us, on the internet.
Even the ones that occur very near, like today, in Jerusalem;
16 people were murdered, and dozes more severely injured in a suicide bombing inside the No. 14 bus.
Now, Israel’s citizens are used to hearing the news on the radio every half hour. We know that everything can change in the blink of an eye. Peace turns to war, Good intentions turn to revenge. Love becomes hate. All these things have been a part of our daily lives for the past few years.
When it comes to the people in the IT industry ,though, it’s like a big bubble.
When we heard the news of the bombing, everyone just kept working, almost like nothing had happened. Here and there people were calling their families to check whether everything was fine and if no one that they knew was hurt, but work kept on like usual. Like it all happened far far away. I cried a bit on the drive home.
If I were a cheap psychiatrist I’d say that perhaps it’s just an emotional line of defense so that people don’t break up. Closing yourself to feelings so as to not tear apart on a daily basis. I guess that’s true. I find myself even more immersed in programming tasks after such things, maybe just trying to “move on”.
I don’t want to get into the politics of all this. I’m smart enough to know that I’m not smart enough about the subject to have a good enough argument for all the reasoning of each side. Fact is, people here get killed daily, people there get killed daily, and it’s only going to get worse. It makes me sometimes feel like I want to pack up all my stuff and go live in another country, far from all this. This feeling is getting pretty common among a lot of people I know- “Getting away from it all”.
I’m starting to feel like the Bagdad Blogger, reporting from the scene on the “Native’s feelings”.
I’ve noticed, that in the IT world, on the net, I seem to get along just fine with people who’s name would usually make the shopping mall guards where I live pretty nervous if they saw them walking in. It’s just natural. Fear and disbelief are starting to rule here. But on the net, like a true bubble, there almost is no “other”. We are all “together” in this stuff. We are all working towards a common cause (be it as small and insignificant as it may), and we consult each other, share with each other.
Utopia - it’s not. But it’s a hell of a lot better than what’s out here.