So the other day I heard someone say, with the impression that it would be illustrative and moving, that in the wake of a recent natural disaster that killed hundreds she canceled a planned trip to Europe.
This strikes me as an excellent model for assuaging one’s survivor guilt more generally, but it would benefit from some nuance. For instance many things happen that don’t quite arrive to the level of canceling a vacation; upon hearing about the deaths of a few people in, say, Norway, in a train accident, you might refuse to put sauce on your pasta for that evening’s dinner; or upon reading that some ridiculous percentage of Americans are planning to vote for Mitt Romney (a tragedy in multiple dimensions), you could forgo your morning coffee. It’s not wearing a chalice, but hey, it’s a start.
This is another manifestation of the erroneous ascribing of backwardly-calculable monetary value to human life.
Celices are readily obtainable from a local Carmelite nunnery, who probably make much money selling them to rich penitents. Interestingly, Sister Wendy, of History of Art popularizing fame, is one of the fabricators thereof. Isn’t the chalice lost? 😉
Another example: In honor of the thousands of your countrymen who died fighting your war of choice in a distant country, and the hundreds of thousands of foreign civilians killed in the ensuing hostilities, you might decide to stop playing golf.