Ruth Carruthers: Compensation
Does the culture of compensation extend beyond the borders of the Western world?
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Compensation is a fickle thing. I noticed that this morning as I opened my mail to discover I had been compensated because someone I’ve never met committed suicide.
The incident happened last Sunday night as I travelled blissfully unaware in the sleeper train between London and Penzance. I awoke on Monday morning to find my train still in the middle of nowhere, but there was a nice view from my window to distract me so I didn’t question it much. Then came a knock at my door .
“There’s been a fatality,” the attendant explained as she handed me my breakfast and a bit of paper. “Someone threw themselves in front of the train last night, so the train’s delayed. Can you fill in this customer survey please?”
“Eh… sure,” I replied, trying to grasp what she was saying. The poor woman was clearly distraught so I did what I was told.
Work didn’t mind that I was a bit late. I’ve tried not to think about it too much since then until this morning when I received a letter from the train company thanking me for filling in the form, apologising for the ‘delay’ and offering me a free standard class ticket for a return journey of my choice. "This is crazy," I thought. A letter of apology I can understand but to get compensated because somebody committed suicide in front of my train? A gratis return journey to London is great but it hardly seems right that somebody had to die for me to get this. The entire situation made me feel uneasy.
I think they call it the ‘butterfly effect’ when your actions affect someone or an event without you even realising it - sometimes for good, sometimes for bad. But I guess it happens all the time right? It’s just that not everybody gets compensated when the butterfly’s wings have an adverse effect.
For example, here we are in the UK having a great time driving around in our cars, importing blueberries from Chile and watching endless television. Sure we are holding the odd conference to discuss climate change and setting emissions targets for 2050 but whilst this is all going on, remote islands near the equator are already sinking and the first climate refugees are on the horizon.
Just because we are not baking yet doesn’t mean that global warming’s not happening. We’re killing the planet and consequently ourselves. It’s a slow suicide for the human race and its future generations that will suffer the most because of our current actions.
People who commit suicide are often thought of as being selfish, never taking into account the effect their actions might have on other people – although, I can’t really pass judgement. Yet since the advent of the industrial revolution, western society has had a profound effect on people in distant lands as we continue to pollute our collective airspace and the comparison seems not to dissimilar.
How then will we compensate those people stranded on a sinking island in the middle of the Indian Ocean? Or families in Africa whose crops continue to fail because of the drought we’ve inflicted on them? Those in the developing world are the innocent bystanders as we inflict climate-induced suicide upon ourselves. Except for them there’s no customer complaints form and there’s certainly no free trip to London.
What they will need is a free trip to another planet and something tells me that’s not going to happen any time soon.
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Compensation (text) by Ruth Carruthers is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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