Earthquake

My God, it's horrific. The tsunami death toll just keeps going up, and now it's past 70.000 people already. The terrible destruction of the waves, played over and over again on the news, with the climbing numbers, paint a dreary picture every day. To be present at the striking of a richter scale 9 earthquake in a neighbouring country that wreaked havoc over two continents is at once exciting and horrifying.

Of course, there's the thrill of being present for such a historic event...earthquakes on this scale, and real tsunamis, occur so rarely that the geological event itself is remarkable. And the scenes on the television play out like snippets of The Day After Tomorrow. It's just apocalyptic, and people are as usual drawn to scenes of enormous devastation. But then it strikes you that seventy thousand dead is not a historical footnote. And millions more have been affected and are still in danger. The ghost of that undersea quake lingers on in the spectre of disease. And the fact that it happened so close to home...it could have easily been someone I know, trapped at Phuket. It could have been my family.

Here in Singapore, where nothing ever happens to us, we can talk about it, and show regional solidarity. But I wonder how we can really understand what's going on. Eyewitnesses all say that the tsunamis were like nothing that they have ever seen, the destruction is something that Hollywood can only reflect palely. When my mum was talking about how she had a premonition not to plan a family trip up north this holiday, I wonder whether she realises that we are lucky only when we view our lot relative to those who have lost so much in this catastrophe. It's apocalyptic, what has happened along the shores of the Indian ocean. But I don't think that we can empathise at all. Their suffering is so alien from what we can conceive of as suffering.

But seeing the Thais and the Sri Lankans mobilising, and seeing all the aid pouring in (so much of it that the agencies are running out of manpower to get it all organised), it's heartening that humanity still pulls together in the face of such calamity. In its morbidly consoling way, at least this tragedy has wiped Iraq and Afghanistan and Israel off the public consciousness, however temporarily. In 911, some men killed 3000 other men, and look at the big mess that caused. Last weekend, a freak occurance of nature (I wonder if you appreciate how devastating a Richter scale 9 earthquake is - the Richter scale measures earthquake energy in exponents of 10 or something like that) killed up to a million people, and in the face of abject destruction on a scale not seen since World War Two, we stand together in goodwill. What makes the two different? The scale of the disaster? The nationalities of the victims?

I want to help too. Right now Hist S essays seem really trivial. But besides mentions in Church, neverending coverage by CNA and the newspapers and a mention during yesterday's dance concert, nothing seems to have happened in Singapore. How do you help when you have no way of getting your help to those who need it?

pondered by phoenican @ 29.12.04