Notre Dame burning – How disaster turned into drama

15 April 2019. The whole world is witnessing the live burning of grand Notre Dame. Thanks to our great fast way of living we’re watching youtube streams of live fire, French Notre Dame is the top trend on every social media and humanity is watching major cultural tressure fall apart right in front of our eyes. Everything happens so quickly.

By now you might not even remember something like that happened just one week ago as so many other stuff had happened since then.

But in that moment we were all struck by videos and photographs of Notre Dame’s towers breaking down and fire going up to the sky.

A couple of hours later and the mood switched drastically from shock and sadness to anger and suddenly no matter what you did you were wrong.

The world’s opinion divided into 2 groups.

The first one was mourning the loss of an art. The second one was upset with people mourning the loss of a building.

All of a sudden we had more groups and even more ridiculous opinions.

• You are shallow if you feel bad for the building.
• Why don’t you focus on real issues?
• It’s just a building.
• Everyone is an architecture fanatic.
• You’re an attention seeker if you share burning Notre Dame on your socials.
• What about nature?
• Donate money to help to rebuild the historical landmark.
• Don’t donate the money.
• Donate money somewhere else.
• Do what you want with your money.
• Why didn’t you gave away that money before?
• Billionaires shouldn’t spend their money on Notre Dame.
• Billionaires need to donate money to climate change instead.
• French doesn’t need the donations anyway.
• Here is my photo from my holiday in France.
• How dare you share your photo from Notre Dame now.
• There are people dying and you care about a building.
• It’s a terrible loss.
• Everything is terrible.

By the end of the day, everyone was just talking shit about everything.

I just love this about human nature. No matter what’s going on there is still someone somewhere who will tell you how horribly wrong you are on the internet.

Don’t get me wrong I truly think it’s incredible how passionate humans can get once they set their mind to it.

It’s fascinating what kind of vivid discussion one burning cathedral brought.

Notre Dames’s fire become a grand shitstorm of opinions and I’m purposely writing about this so late after the events. We all had time to calm down. The last couple of days have been rough and in times like this I always think about the tv show called “The good place”

It’s a Netflix show starring Kristen Bell. The basic theme of the series is the concept of heaven and hell or in other words the good place and the bad place. Our actions make us good or bad.

It turned out that it become so much harder (to be fair impossible) for people these days to be “good”.

All because of unintentional consequences of our actions.

For example, you buy a shirt. That shirt could have been made by child labor, underpaid jobs, or in dangerous work environments, it contributes to world pollution, climate change, and so on. AKA you’re a horrible person.

Or in this particular case. You’re a billionaire who decided to donate a bunch of money to rebuild an old architectural structure but people are upset with you because you didn’t donate that money to some other causes. AKA you’re a horrible person.

So there is a moral dilemma in this Notre Dame drama.

• Sure people with money are free to do whatever they want with their money.
• Sure it would be great if they could spend them on good causes.
• Sure Notre Dame catastrophe is heartbreaking.
• Sure there are bigger and more horrifying issues going on.

But most importantly:

Are you the one to judge?

It’s incredible how angry everyone got.

Angry is good. Angry gets shit done. – American gods

But aren’t you tired of being so angry all the time?

Now for a bit of a personal point of view:

I’ve been to Paris and the mentioned building three times already. I enjoy art and literature and I never expected to be this affected by Notre Dames’s collapsing. Each time I was there I was walking the halls alongside hundreds of tourists.

Can you even imagine how many people have visited Notre Dame and how personal the destruction become?

People know it. It’s familiar. Everyone suddenly remembers the chilling almost holly feeling they felt when they stepped in. I surely did. That’s why I was truly saddened when I saw that video of the falling tower while by standing people sang Ave Maria. I realized no one ever is going to see what I saw because it’s up in the flames.

I never associate Notre Dame with church. Yes of course Christians perform masses in there as well but I always thought about it as an artistic muse for writers, poets, painters…

Ironically it pleases me that the catastrophe brought attention to Victor Hugo’s book.

It pleases me people get so passionate and are willing to fight for their beliefs.

I’m glad there is enough money to repair the damages.

Of course, I would be thrilled if we could as easily find money to save the world as well.

The road the fire took in the media and the drama that launched because of it is not really surprising if you remember how much we all love good drama and being right.