Prior to my discovery of the blogosphere, I kept an irregular paper journal of my thoughts. I own 3 of them. Only one has writing in it. The entries in it range from 1998 to 2004. I have this vanity problem, so as I would write in it, I'd imagine some historian coming upon it at a yard sale 500 years from now, and using to help build context into a topic he was researching from our times. Hey! I said I have a vanity problem. Anyway, that thought popped back into my brain tonight, and I realized that future researcher would have a field day with me. Here we are, witnessing first hand perhaps the worst natural disaster of our lifetimes, and I pretty much ignore it in favor of professional American football.
It's really not that I the Asian Tsunami is any small matter. For me, it's an issue of scope. We are at what, a 60,000 death toll? And that number seems to be rising by the hour. Outside of publishing a compendium of first hand accounts, I don't know what to say about it. This is a disaster that really defies words.
All I can say on the topic is that sometimes poverty leaves humanity vulnerable to such events. That is truly the case here, and several big blogs are pushing economic growth as the solution to these disasters. I offer one note of caution, though. Sometimes modernity and arrogance leads to great tragedy, too. We are ripe in the Western world for an epidemic illness or a natural disaster which we feel invincible to because of our technology and our wealth. When it comes, be it next week, next year, or in one hundred years, it will humble us. And there will be no one out there to offer us in the first world any aid.
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