ONE DAY LATER

I don’t really want to say very much this morning. Events on the other side of the world are still unfolding and I think that my usual diet of whimsy mixed with a little self-examination that I serve up to you here wouldn’t be appropriate on a day when those of us still standing need to reflect, remember and thank our lucky stars.

The unscheduled second posting about the terrifying and sudden events in Japan which I posted here yesterday* rather said it all for me, and there is very little I can add to those thoughts as we head into the next day. Twenty-four hours can seem an awfully long time when lives are being changed in seconds, and, unlike those who are still standing in the earthquake zone today, already the impact for those of us who are impassive observers is diminishing, despite the fact that I spent a lot of my normal, ordinary, dull little day getting on with things and being very distracted by thinking about and seeing those horrific images that, like the rawness of nature they were depicting, kept on coming.

The more I saw, the more sympathy I felt for the victims, but I also started to feel a bit like the worst kind of voyeur, especially when the media started to wheel out ‘scientific experts’ to give me a moment-by-moment commentary on truly horrific images as if they were talking about a movie or a video game, and repeating the sequences over and over again until they were starting to reduce the magnitude of these terrible things that were still going on to the level of animated wallpaper.

Eventually, their glorification of human suffering (because that is what it really started to feel like) got too much for me to bear, and, because I can, I shut it off. The problem is that, for those people to whom it was actually happening, they could not just switch it off, and that whole dreadful, terrifying day just kept on throwing more and more at them.

Sometimes a picture is worth a million words and we should just shut up and watch and just try to extend some pity towards the poor wretches (no, that’s not a good word, it lacks dignity and decency), the real people who were just going about their lives like you and me are on what was, until that point, just an ordinary day. Suddenly, out of the blue, ordinary human beings were being devoured by that unstoppable wave and we should try to empathise, try to put ourselves in their shoes instead of wallowing with an almost pornographic relish in the imagery.

There is a place for schadenfreude in the world, but this wasn’t it, and already the media is focussing away from the sensationalism of the images and moving on as if they have already tired of it and are seeking out the next big thing to tantalise and tease us with. That’s the thing with 24 hour rolling news, it chews you up, spits you out and moves along when it’s tired of you.

I came up here full of thoughts about nuclear reactors this morning, having spent much of the night brewing up many of my own observations which were rattling around my head as I heard about the new problems that were adding to the problems Japan was already suffering. With what I was hearing last night, I should be grateful that I’m still here and able to wake up at all. When I sat in my chair though, none of my opinions seemed important enough or informed enough to have any real meaning, and I would just have been wittering on again, pointlessly, and these really don’t feel like the times for that.

Normal service will be resumed, of course, because that’s what we human beings do when faced with the incomprehensible, and we’ll even find the time to laugh about things again soon. I’m sure that the internet is already buzzing with ‘jokes’ but don’t, whatever you do, send them to me.

Not today.

Today, like a sudden unexpected roar of laughter you hear when you’re attending a funeral, it would grate and seem just wrong.

* ‘Hell on Earth’ - http://bit.ly/hepJZz - 11/03/2011

HELL ON EARTH

I don’t usually ‘do’ topical events and current affairs here, but sometimes something happens that seems so devastating, so (literally) Earth-shattering and shocking that I have to set aside my usual witterings on the minutiae of life and comment upon it. I hope that you won’t find these thoughts too inappropriate on such a morning, but I really feel that I’ve got to say something, do something, even though there’s very little I can actually do sitting here on the other side of the world and waiting for the terrible events to unfold as they inevitably must.

From today's BBC News Website

This morning I idly clicked on to my news pages to see what was going on in the world and found the images coming out of Japan and I was truly, deeply shocked by them. Images of an endless wall of water chock full of debris, cars, ships and even complete houses, sweeping across the landscape around the Tohoku region, and just keeping on going and going and going, overwhelming everything that it came across. I watched it approach canals, busy roads and even cities and nothing that it arrived at slowed it down in any way whatsoever. It just swamped them, consumed them, devoured them, and then the water just kept on going onwards and onwards and onwards as if they had never even been there, and looking for all the world as if it was never, ever going to stop coming.

So far the news agencies are describing what’s happening as a massive magnitude 8.9 earthquake that triggered an enormous Tsunami that, even as I write, is rolling across the Pacific basin and overwhelming everything in its path. Real people living real lives are about to have those lives changed forever in a few moments and it’s all completely out of their control. The raw power of nature that we, as human beings, laughably like to think that we have some kind of control over just sweeping people and buildings aside like so much matchwood. Truly, this looked like some kind of Hell on Earth.

Nothing much else seems to matter this morning, and I’ve got very little to add at this time, except to hope that the human cost of this terrible day remains comparatively slight, and to send my pathetic thoughts, condolences and sympathies out to all those struggling to cope with this disaster today. I can’t begin to imagine the fear and the horror anyone might feel as that terrifying powerful torrent comes towards them and there is absolutely nowhere to run to, nowhere you can go, and I truly hope that I never, ever have to. I can’t begin to understand what it feels like to have everything and everyone you’ve ever known just washed away in a moment, to lose everything because of a fickle quirk of nature randomly picking you out and blowing your life away.

We take so much in our lives for granted. We like to think that the ground beneath our feet is “rock solid” and that the water is a fun playground and food resource for our human lives, forgetting that, in the bigger picture, it’s we humans that are the insignificant part of the equation and that the planet can sometimes be a cruel, heartless, unfeeling place that really doesn’t pay much attention to our hopes and dreams, problems and aspirations, buildings and infrastructure or lives and deaths. Nature rolls its dice and as far as it is concerned we are negligible collateral damage, left to only weep and mourn and try to rebuild again before the next time we get knocked over.

It says something about the glory that is the human spirit, however, that we are prepared to pick ourselves up again and try to carry on whenever these things happen, and it says even more that we are prepared to drop everything and do whatever we can to help, which is what I hope we will all do as the dust settles and the survivors of these terrible, terrible events start to pick up the pieces again.