So much happened on the national scene yesterday, a huge news day. McCain proposed a withdrawl-- er, "victory"...timetable of five more years in Iraq, to counter his previous "as long as it takes" policy. President Chimpzilla ran his mouth in Israel (at one point in an attempt to disparage the soon-to-be Democratic presidential nominee), only to send Senator Joe Biden into a philippic on the senate floor. Chris Matthews laid a fat smackdown on a rethug sock puppet that was a true thing of beauty on Hardball.
I saw some of the first images out of disaster-wrought China yesterday, AND finally, my first cable news segment from what they're calling the "river of death" in Myanmar. Looking at some of the Reuters images from China made me cry, involuntarily. I can't imagine anyone seeing them and not being affected. The "river of death" segment on CNN Headline News was even more gut-twisting-- bloated human corpses strewn about the riverbanks alongside rotting oxen, arms and hooves aflail and stiffened. I watched the segment until the end, until I was bawling audibly, and then I kept digging for photos and news reports out of China. I told a friend of mine to look, and as soon as he got to a first disturbing picture-- a mother wailing over the half plastic-wrapped body of her teenaged daughter, he declared enough, he couldn't look anymore.
I can look. I want to look. NPR's Melissa Block and Robert Siegel are blogging from Sichuan, and reading their posts tears my heart out, but I can't ignore them. The images and the stories are graphic and they're real.
If the cable news networks, say, would have supplanted all that was going on domestically yesterday, with the images and video that are coming out of both China and Myanmar, Americans would get a taste of the kind of stomach and consciousness required to survive in this world, for some. The grief-wrought faces of the mothers and brothers and rescue workers in those areas will break into you.
I imagine some people would say the graphic coverage might be "depressing" or inappropriate for children, but nature knows nothing of inappropriate-- nor of the thousands of children claimed in these latest disasters. Tsunamis, cyclones, and hurricanes don't leave time for lifeboats filled with women and children to be lowered into the dark sea, they don't pass over the doors marked with the blood of the lamb-- they are as infallible as infants and as indiscriminate as when lightening strikes.
In party politics we can cease to be kind or conservative, but when disaster hits, we're all simply humans beholden to the destructive, indiscriminate whims of our natural world. Despite ideological divisions and the atrocities we commit against each other in the name of them, natural disaster is something which threatens to one day wipe us all off the face of this planet.
I'll never forget the knock on my door when Katrina's winds had finally quelled themselves to a still-deafening, though safer howl, and there stood Travis and Sarah-- two people from down the street whom I'd never met before. There was an oak tree in my bedroom, and half of my structure was razed. I had sat there with a friend for three hours, the longest three hours of my life, wondering if that stop sign out front would ever stop flapping like a flag, or if another tree would fall through and take down the other half of the house and us with it.
I was never so happy to see two other human beings in my life, as when Sarah and Travis came knocking after Katrina, to see if we were alive and needed anything. Sarah put me up for the night in her daughter Ella's room. I slept in Ella's trundle bed beneath her white curtains, and I spent the semi-dark night looking at all of the still things in her room-- her flower print rug, ballerina figurines, the spines of each of her books, which had all been spared, like myself. I was so happy to be alive.
The next day I went back to my half-razed house to salvage what hadn't been demolished or water damaged when the tree fell into my bedroom. Travis and Sarah were but the first to stop. People saw the tree in my roof and stopped so frequently, I eventually just left my door open so people could see me moving around inside. As soon as I could, I joined the masses of the wandering, went searching for water and news. It wasn't until five days later, when the gas pumps were opened on generators and I filled up and left with my cat, that I found out how bad things were in New Orleans. When I'd left Hattiesburg, Mississippi on the Friday after the Sunday night when Katrina hit, FEMA was nowhere to be found. When I reached Florida, after having to travel north, then west, then south to get there, and I turned on a television, it hit me how lucky I was. How I had been one of the spared, despite how narrowly I might have missed being counted as one of the dead.
In the wake of these diasters in Myanmar and China, despite the distance, I consider myself one of the spared.
Take a minute and let the images move you. Then, if you can, donate.