Tsunami

The news continues to develop concerning the magnitude 9.0 earthquake in the Indian ocean that generated tsunamis responsible for some 60,000 deaths and counting in several Asian nations. It is a disaster unparalleled in recent times and will test the responsiveness of the world in preventing the death toll from rising due to disease from bad water and lack of healthful food. Already the UN humanitarian aid chief has criticized wealthy nations for being stingy in their first response. But as the news trends towards showing that many victims were American and European tourists, the efforts at rescue and relief are apt to intensify.

In the coming weeks, as the world begins to absorb the dimensions of the effects, there will be some sober assessments of what's needed both to warn populations of danger (the tsunami took several hours to reach shore) and to organize response and relief. It should be a wake up call, though there's no guarantee much will be done about it, once the story is displaced or descends into soap opera about individual victims and the video they left behind.

It may perhaps provide some imagery to the warnings of scientists about the effects of global heating as sea levels rise in some places, and storms become more frequent and violent, and show up where they are not expected, like the rains that would otherwise be making headlines now pummeling central and southern California.

But it will probably be a long time before people begin to wonder why the nations of the world, especially the richest and most powerful, are so intent on pouring resources and expertise into vast armies and armadas and technologies of destruction, when that effort, that organization, that commitment and those resources are needed to provide relief and anticipatory protection from the many kinds of destruction that don't require the direct participation of humanity in causing them, though indirectly we contribute to them or even precipitate them.

Here in the U.S., it might re-focus our attention on what it means to be sending our National Guard troops away from where they are the traditional resource for disaster response, and further what the sharply declining enrollments in the Guard because of Iraqnam will mean to the future, when the tsuanmi hits these shores.