激動

(terrible shock)

Again. As it wasn't hard enough to write this the first time.

The mind quails in the face of disasters, especially the large-scale catastrophes like earthquakes, tsunamis, and nuclear meltdowns. To face that unholy triumvirate in a matter of hours...

This is perhaps the most frightening video I've seen in my life. At first--for about ten seconds, anyway--it almost looks as if you could walk through the tsunami. Then you notice cars being swept along like bathtub toys. Five minutes later, the ungodly tide is rife with wrecked bits of building and who knows how many bodies. It's utterly terrifying, even viewed at a sixty five hundred mile remove.

Some sources rate this earthquake the equal of the one that spawned the Sumatran tsunami seven years ago. As of now, the death toll in that earlier temblor and wave train is a couple of orders of magnitude higher than the official count from this one. But casualties are expected to rise dramatically into the tens of thousands. It's speculated that only Japan's rigorous building codes kept this disaster from matching or perhaps exceeding that one.

In some ways, I found this even harder to bear, mostly because I could relate very well to the video footage. This was a residential, retail and industrial area in a First World country not overmuch different from my own. The beaches of Banda Aceh lacked a perspective my mind could seize on: it's somehow easier to lessen the visual impact of a house reduced to kindling when you realize it wasn't much more than kindling to begin with.

But watching this: these are people's lives and livelihoods, again, not all that different from mine, carried off with no regard for sensibility or sanity. The cleanup for this will be measured in decades, using money Japan doesn't exactly have. Their economy has been in the doldrums for most of the last twenty years and was only recently showing signs of some slight uptick.

Two partial nuclear meltdowns and fears of a third, with more aftershocks sure to come. A dam burst. Infernos. Volcanic eruptions. A million or more people displaced. Just terrible, with no end in sight. The mind quakes. At some point you just want to throw up your hands and say "enough". Actually, I'm well past that point. It's pretty much numbing, now.

Real lives. Real people. Real hardship.

Japan is one of the most generous countries in the world when it comes to foreign aid. It's time to return that generosity with interest. Please give whatever you can to the relief effort, and then give a little more, just because.