Thursday, December 30, 2004

This is real...

The latest number (as of today) of people that died in the Asian tsunami is up to 117,000. That's un-freakin-believable.

Sitting here warm in my middle class house in small town America where the biggest news that's happened here lately is that fire they had at that container place a few months ago, it's easy to be a bit indifferent to news of this magnitude. But this is HUGE. As one website I read put it, we are "witnesses to one of the greatest natural disasters in ALL of world history." 117,00 people dead and rising. Right now, that's DOUBLE the population of the people who reside in Decatur. That's 5-6 times the number of people who died in Pompeii when Vesuvius erupted centuries ago, in another great natural disaster of the world. It's something like 45-50 times the number of people who died on 9/11/01.

This is not a movie like "The Day After Tomorrow." And, after all the number of deaths in terrorist attacks and wars going on in the world, this story may seem like just another headline. But it isn't. On a nice, sunny day in Asia, the lives of thousands and thousands of people were drowned out...literally... This really happened, and there's a whole section of our world crying out with a deeper pain than most of us will ever know...

God, I don't want to sit here numb to this kind of a tragedy...

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