Jim Hopkins: Helpless TV watchers bond in solidarity

We put new organs in old bodies. We cut and paste our DNA to overcome disease. We clone life. We harvest stem cells. We walk on the moon. We live in space. But we cannot rule the earth.

We are masters of the universe and prisoners of the crust. In a thousand years, if we're still here, we may have found a way to engineer the world's convulsions. Now we just watch.

We sit like useless Gods, omnipotent and impotent, in lounges as remote as Olympus, and watch while tiny giant waves roll into places with unfamiliar names where people like us have made their homes. We see these waves, murderously indifferent, crushing houses, swallowing cars, killing people like us.

And there's nothing we can do. Except turn the TV off.

The world's our instant now. We can watch (or choose not to) as aeroplanes drop bombs on men with sticks or while the trespassing sea savages landscapes like our own or when the plates beneath us move and cathedrals crumble.

Sometimes, some of us are the people on whom these things are visited. Most of the time, most of us are the audience, powerless observers, distant in fact, engaged in feeling, fused to the moment by our capacity to imagine what it would mean if it was happening to us.

Watching is a bond, a guilty obligation and an act of solidarity. We may hate ourselves for watching but we would hate ourselves more if we turned away. Indifference forfeits the kinship each of us shares.

No one runs from Marathon any more with news of the battle. Or, if they do, they find the news has arrived already.

It is novel and disturbing, this power we have to snare the world and hold it captive in a corner of the lounge. These are days of miracles and miseries, live death, long-distance close-ups, indirect terrors, monsters squeezed on to a screen. And none of it comes later. All of it comes now.

When plagues assailed the medieval world, there was no warning. When the Tambora volcano erupted in 1815 and 100,000 people died, there was a letter in the Times seven months later.

When the Hindenburg caught fire above the Lakehurst Naval Air Station in 1937, there were newsreels seven days later.

The news didn't come to us then, we went to it. People watched that airship fall, black and white and burning, in the dark at the movies, while dust mites danced in the bright shaft of light that gave the screen its life.

It's an album cover now, that accident. And though the fear of radiation haunts us like the plague, comics use shots of atomic bombs exploding as a punch line. Time is the greatest distance of all.

Yet resonances survive, one in particular from the Hindenburg's crash. There was a man at Lakehurst that day who worked for a radio station. He'd been sent to cover the arrival of a modern marvel.

At first, he speaks calmly as the airship floats in. But when flames dance along its hull, the horror of what he's seeing steals his composure. As passengers, tiny as ants, leap from the blaze and fall to the ground, he tries to describe this awful thing he's watching.

But he can't. When the Hindenburg sags, wild with fire, its girders exposed in the glare, all he can say, voice broken with an anguish still raw is, "Oh, the humanity!"

If you've heard the account, you'll know how intensely that man felt those words. They still resonate. They still capture the essence of every awful thing we see. They're still the measure of the anguish we feel, 74 years later, sitting in our chairs, watching things we cannot change but wish had never happened.

Earthquakes, tsunamis, unwished and unwelcome, blind to consequence, come when they come. And if we're there when they do then, oh, the humanity!

There's no sense to these things other than the sense we make of them. Events are not articulate. They don't evidence intent.

The world is an incoherent place. It holds wonders beyond fathom and dreads we fear to name. We are sustained - and imperilled - by the random accidents of our planet. Its benefits and cruelties give us life and take it from us, too.

Nothing makes sense beyond the sense we make of it.

Once we thought the gods did these things to us. They don't. Any god who did wouldn't warrant our belief.

We will find more consolation in chance than we ever will in choice.

We have free will but the earth has free rein. And free reign too, it seems. Some say they can predict the planet's assaults.

Prediction is the control we have when we have no control. Which we don't. Not yet. In our world, plates and plagues just do what they've always done. And heaven will not help us if we're in the way.