While most are happy to see the latter tossed into the dustbin of history, others undeniably benefitted from them. There are specific manufacturing jobs that will never return, for one, and there are certain gender, racial, and other social norms that are inexorably shifting. In America, both the right and the left lament that the contexts they used to be able to count on are disappearing. Photo: Getty Images / Andrew Lichtenstein US Steel manufacturing plant in Pennsylvania, shuttered several decades ago. And then there was that lone asshole who turned his truck off the road for the hell of it, just so he could see what it felt like to cut a swathe right through Peru’s 2000-year-old Nazca lines.Ī Venezuelan shopkeeper and his shop, before and after the crisis. Or the numerous places of worship, ancient artifacts, and other irreplaceable patrimonial gems destroyed by ISIS in the relatively few years since they came into existence, including Mosul Museum and the beautiful city of Palmyra, a World Heritage site.
Think of the Buddhas of Bamiyan, dynamited beyond repair by the Taliban in 2001. Some of our most heartbreaking losses have been wrought by ourselves. The destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan left a physical hole. The architecture, the artwork, the relics, the treasures, the bodies buried there, the history… Would we lose it all? Thankfully much was saved, but a painful amount was still lost.Īnd Notre Dame is not the only agonizing loss in recent times. The shocking, simultaneously sudden and slow-burning destruction of Notre Dame wrenched tears from the devout and the non-religious alike the world over. Pitiless flames consumed and collapsed large portions of what is not only a Parisian cornerstone, but a globally admired monument, a cathedral that is not only a Christian shrine but a testament to human feats of engineering and artistry, and a steadfast witness to 850 years of European history. On Monday, at the outset of the Christian Holy Week, Notre Dame Cathedral burned.