SO THE financial markets are in shambles, your wealth has taken a hit, and you'll have to make do with a simple year-end getaway instead of a fancy trip.

But now that the Bangkok trip you've painstakingly planned has been flushed down the toilet - thanks to a pesky throng of protesters in yellow - you're thinking: how much worse can things get?

Try a terrorist attack in Mumbai. Nearly 200 people are dead, including one of our own. Would we, however, feel the same way if there hadn't been a Singaporean casualty?

If no Singaporean had been sacrificed in the attacks, we'd perhaps feel more direct pain if the Straits Times Index had taken another drubbing as a result of the attacks.

And even so, it is almost second nature to believe that things will get better eventually, like they always do. We then move on, and behave like the bad stuff never really happened.

Economic booms and busts are part of a self-correcting cycle. Calamities that happen in distant countries are, well, distant - until we learn our countrymen may be involved.

The 1997 Asian economic crisis came and went. Your portfolio may have been hit, but you may also have picked up some bargains on the stock market and made a tidy profit.

And if you're reading this now, you survived the Sars outbreak in 2003.

You might have even got a few days off work.

Tsunami struck

A year later, you may have had to cancel your Phuket beach holiday because of a minor inconvenience called a tsunami, which just happened to have killed hundreds of thousands of people.

Thank goodness you weren't there at the wrong time.

But a year after that, suicide bombers descended on yet another favourite holiday destination, Bali - forcing you to re-think your vacation plans.

Most Singaporeans manage to escape every crisis relatively unscathed.

The worst part of these events? Inconvenience.

How close to home must a crisis hit before it really hurts? Or do we just have to be hit by a whole slew of crises before we even flinch?

If we take a step back and look at the big picture, we probably haven't seen a worse time for all these tragedies to be unfolding - and simultaneously, too.

It seems like the perfect storm.

If we try, we may even catch a glimpse of it as it passes.

This article was first published in The New Paper on Nov 30, 3008.