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.