Our Japanese Neighbors

10,000 lost souls . . . what can one say in the face of such a natural calamity? Certainly Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell would have a ready answer . . . something to the tune of, “ this is God’s way of punishing . . .” To idiots such as these religious fascists, their mean little god is always about punishing someone, just for the hell of it. To the rest of us, you know, just normal people, we have a less corrupt, distorted view of god and/or nature. “Shit happens” seems to capture it nicely. Our natural world is not perfect, and stuff seems to just happen every now and again. You can prepare for it, and by all accounts, the Japanese prepared perhaps better than anyone else on this globe. But a quake of over 8 magnitude??? Hard to prepare. And I am just beginning to understand the true power of a tsunami. That much water rushing at you at 30-40 miles per hour exceeds any definition of “awesome” power.
But we can try to empathize with the Japanese people and to understand that they really are our neighbors on this spinning globe. We should try to do everything we can to assist, and to let them know that we care. In such situations, we really are our brother’s keeper. We can and should mourn with them their loss of so many mothers, fathers, sons, daughters.
And when tomorrow comes around, and their recovery is assured, and that day will come, we might want to think about the other living souls on our planet, and how we can begin to live together without trying to kill one another so frequently. I realize that those to the right seem to like killing things, people and animals. But maybe a natural catastrophe such as this in Japan should make us pause. Perhaps in the face of this disaster, when so many earthlings died, it would be appropriate to ask whether there aren’t alternatives to killing as the dispute resolution of choice. Isn’t that why we invented the United Nations?
Can we at least give it a try folks?