Mama Nature ~ 2004-12-29

I haven’t seen the television in a week. I haven’t read a newspaper. I have read a few cnn.com articles. The devastation in the world this week is beyond anything that I can begin the comprehend. What makes it worse is to understand that for the survivors the suffering is not over. Disease, famine, finding shelter. How do you rebuild your lives after this? We had 9-11 but we had someone to direct our anger toward (or misdirect it in many cases.) This? This is just out of control.

I have been trying to keep up with the news, without coming across visual representation of it. Why? I’m not sure. I wonder if seeing the pictures of what happened is some sort of penance that we should pay for being lucky. I wonder if not seeing the pictures will make it less real? We’re so visual with our news – the memory of those planes hitting the towers is burned into my memory. Do I need a visual of this to grieve, to better make sense of it? I don’t know. For now I think that all that I can imagine is probably equal to the devastation that I would see.

Mother Nature is powerful. It’s wrong to ignore the possibility of natural disaster in any of our lives. Global warming will change what we view as “normal” in our world. What can I do beside send aid to those in need? I can petition my government to recognize that unless our country works with the rest of the world to curb industry and emissions disasters such as these could happen more frequently. It may not be in my generation, or in my grandchildren’s but it will happen someday and it scares the living crap out of me.