Sorry for the silence. When too much is going on, I need to retreat and cogitate. I love the Internet, but I don’t like that aspect of it that expects everybody with a few brain cells and a keyboard to be an instant expert, and I don’t like that aspect of it that treats the most profound human experiences as just another fleeting newsbit or opportunity to promote an agenda.<\/p>\n
How does one respond to a catastrophe like the Japanese earthquake and tsunami? Everything you read or see appears to be the work of the six blind men inspecting an elephant<\/a>.<\/p>\n The news dwells on the unspeakable. Meanwhile, people in less-affected parts of Japan protest that all is normal<\/a> and the media is overblowing everything as usual. But you’ve seen all those videos. Nothing’s normal. Except the usual chaos.<\/p>\n And what about that nuke plant? We can choose between voices of reason (here<\/a> and here<\/a>), EVERYBODY’S GONNA DIE!!!!<\/I> hysteria<\/a> (scroll down about 1\/3 of the way), or anything<\/a> in between.<\/a> The latest (H\/T P.T.) isn’t good<\/a>, though it also isn’t China syndrome.<\/a> Still, those of us without engineering backgrounds or on-the-scene sources are shooting in the dark. <\/p>\n Why is it never okay just to say, “I don’t know”? Or “let’s get the facts before we Pronouncify or Pontificate”?<\/p>\n The only thing we can be sure of is the one thing we can always<\/i> be sure of — that any official government statement is a lie.<\/p>\n Oh yeah. And that any government that possibly can will use the latest disaster as an opportunity for a power grab. So life goes on — except for 10,000 or so dead and a few hundred thousand whose lives will never be the same again.<\/p>\n —–<\/p>\n When I was a kid, I wanted to be a seismologist. Even built my own seismograph. Which didn’t work worth a damn, of course. But I was fascinated with both the geological and human stories of earthquakes and tsunamis and consumed all the quake histories I could get my hands on. I learned about quakes in unexpected places<\/a> and read the tragic and comic tales from San Francisco<\/a>.<\/p>\n The geology makes you feel hopelessly small. But the individual human hells of the worst quakes are beyond imagining. An image from the 1964 Good Friday quake in Alaska<\/a> stays with me: The quake caused an enormous oil fire near the shore in Seward, then wave after wave of the tsunami (and tsunamis in are worse in harbors than anywhere else) carried the fire inland. Can you imagine a wall of flaming water<\/i> bearing down on you? God has a nasty sense of humor.<\/p>\n He’s apparently big on irony, too — hitting Lisbon when its population was mostly in church<\/a> and inspiring an irreverent rhyme after destroying San Francisco’s churches in 1906<\/a>.<\/p>\n No, I don’t really think some wrathful God hurled a tsunami at northern Japan or deliberately sent cathedrals crashing down on worshipers in Portugal. Could be. If so, he has a habit of being amazingly indiscriminate in his wrath-flinging. In the best case, I think if there’s a god out there, he’s one coldly indifferent fella.<\/p>\n