Tsunami and Response
The enormity of this tragedy
is almost beyond grasp. Count is now approaching 120,000 dead, with thousands still missing, and other thousands also missing from Sweden, Germany and other nations. Some five million estimated now at risk because of lacking food, water, shelter and medicine. Water supplies all contaminated. Many are desperate already. Many still in shock. Relief fund is up to $500 million, and the USA will apparently now do more than the $15 million first promised.
Entire seaside villages wiped out and many bodies washed out to sea. Children orphaned everywhere. Emotional trauma will last for many years for many thousands, esp those multitudes who made their living on the coasts by tourism and by fishing. (See link below) No one predicted or imagined such a natural disaster.
This stretches both our minds and our hearts. Many aid agencies thankfully at work. We are now truly a village. Hopefully Americans as a people will be typically generous. Still, an event like this undermines the stability of our entire world. What is certain? What can be depended upon? How dependent are we on others, even for the basics? How much do we take for granted? Jesus told us our neighbor was anyone in need, anyone hurting in the ditch.
"It's a tragedy but it is also an opportunity to demonstrate that terrorism doesn't drive out everything else," said Morton Abramowitz, who served as American ambassador to Thailand a quarter century ago and went on to become one of the founders of the International Crisis Group, which helps prepare governments to respond to unexpected shocks. "It's a chance for Mr, Bush to show what kind of country we are."
Mr. Bush and his aides have long argued that the administration's reputation around the world is undeserved. The aid effort that has now begun presents Mr. Bush with an opportunity to battle, with action rather than just words, the perception that took root in his first four years in office that he is all about America first.
Sign on ski slope: "We are all in this together. Report unsafe skiiers." Metaphor for life?
You can help. Please bookmark this link, for information and donations: http://www.google.com/tsunami_relief.html
Tsunami Torments Minds after Breaking Bodies
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/123104C.shtml
is almost beyond grasp. Count is now approaching 120,000 dead, with thousands still missing, and other thousands also missing from Sweden, Germany and other nations. Some five million estimated now at risk because of lacking food, water, shelter and medicine. Water supplies all contaminated. Many are desperate already. Many still in shock. Relief fund is up to $500 million, and the USA will apparently now do more than the $15 million first promised.
Entire seaside villages wiped out and many bodies washed out to sea. Children orphaned everywhere. Emotional trauma will last for many years for many thousands, esp those multitudes who made their living on the coasts by tourism and by fishing. (See link below) No one predicted or imagined such a natural disaster.
This stretches both our minds and our hearts. Many aid agencies thankfully at work. We are now truly a village. Hopefully Americans as a people will be typically generous. Still, an event like this undermines the stability of our entire world. What is certain? What can be depended upon? How dependent are we on others, even for the basics? How much do we take for granted? Jesus told us our neighbor was anyone in need, anyone hurting in the ditch.
"It's a tragedy but it is also an opportunity to demonstrate that terrorism doesn't drive out everything else," said Morton Abramowitz, who served as American ambassador to Thailand a quarter century ago and went on to become one of the founders of the International Crisis Group, which helps prepare governments to respond to unexpected shocks. "It's a chance for Mr, Bush to show what kind of country we are."
Mr. Bush and his aides have long argued that the administration's reputation around the world is undeserved. The aid effort that has now begun presents Mr. Bush with an opportunity to battle, with action rather than just words, the perception that took root in his first four years in office that he is all about America first.
Sign on ski slope: "We are all in this together. Report unsafe skiiers." Metaphor for life?
You can help. Please bookmark this link, for information and donations: http://www.google.com/tsunami_relief.html
Tsunami Torments Minds after Breaking Bodies
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/123104C.shtml
posted by Paschal Baute at 7:10 AM
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1 Comments:
See also Bob Herbert, NY Times: “Our Planet, Our duty”
December 31, 2004 (link below)
“One moment the kids were laughing and skylarking on the beach, yelling and chasing one another, sweating in the warm bright sun. The next moment they were gone.
“The world is used to horror stories, but not on the stupefying scale of the macabre tales coming at us from the vast and disorienting zone of death in tsunami-stricken southern Asia. Einstein insisted that God does not play dice with the world, but that might be a difficult notion to sell to some of the agonized individuals who have seen everything they've lived for washed away in a pointless instant.
. . . .
“Perhaps a third of those killed were children. Many were swept away before the eyes of horrified, helpless parents. "My children! My children!" screamed a woman in Sri Lanka. "Why didn't the water take me?"
“The killer waves that moved with ferocious speed across an unprecedented expanse of global landscape flung their victims about with a randomness that was all but impossible to comprehend. People in beachfront dwellings ended up in trees, or entangled in electrical power lines, or embedded in the mud of hillsides. People died in buses, cars and trucks that were swept along by the waves like leaves in a strong wind. Sunbathers were swept out to sea.
. . .
“It's a peculiarity of modern technology that people anywhere in the world can sit back and watch in real time, like voyeurs, the life-and-death struggles of their fellow humans. The planet is growing smaller and its residents more interdependent by the day. We're fully aware that our planetary neighbors in southern Asia are desperately drawing upon the deepest reservoirs of fortitude and resilience that our troubled species has at its disposal.
“What this means is that we're the supportive community. All of us. This catastrophe would at least have a silver lining if it moved the people of the United States and other nations toward a wiser, more genuinely cooperative international posture.
“William Faulkner, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, said: "I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance."
“That's what Faulkner believed. We'll see.” -Herbert
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/31/opinion/31herbert.html
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