The End of World (edit)

December 30, 2004

SOME say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire...
Robert Frost

And for some, as we all too well now know, their world ended with water.

The curious thing about water though, is that without it, we all die quickly.

Now with it, in the blink of an eye, we have been witness to one of the greatest natural disasters of this century. A little bit of background checking has shown however, that it pales to the 3 million killed in China in 1931 in a combination of flood and famine.

Here and there we read about people who drive into a swollen creek and their car is washed away, but few of us have ever really experienced the devistating force that is produced by water in motion.

Globally, water is nature's biggest killer.

The video that you can see on various internet sites (and in the news) lustrates the spped and force of this disaster. One video is from a hotel in Thailand, the other from Indonesia, near the epicenter of the quake.

In the Indonesian video a family flees to their balcony as just about their entire world is washed away around them.

It's no wonder that countless thousands will never be found.

"A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty." - Albert Einstein

Beauty...

It's a funny thing about beauty, one minute it's there, captured and preserved in movies and postcards and the like, and in the next minute, it's gone and in it's place, bloated bodies and a littered landscape.

I don't really know what to say, except that I do know that some of the things I wanted to write about, the history of the last several weeks, seems so trivial, insignificant and meaningless in the context of this disaster.

Eighty thousand people are dead.

Eighty thousand! (Edit - Now 114,000 and the brain is having trouble trying to understand the magnitude of it all.)

And tens of thousands are still missing.

I'm stunned.

I'm just stunned.

But I will say one thing, because it's a thought that keeps rambling around in my head and I was just reminded of it again as I looked at the headlines.

As you may know, the hardest hit nation of all in this disaster has been that of Indonesia. Indonesia is the fourth most pouplated nation in the world, and 88% of its people are Muslim.

So as the world watches in shock and confusion, Indonesia's Muslim breatheren in Iraq and Saudia Arabia have offered the world a great example of how to react to this tragedy, by blowing up more Muslims.

Perhaps it all will end in fire after all.

Links to video - can be slow to load.