Our planet shrinks - are we our brother's keeper?

Our Planet, and Our Duty
December 31, 2004
By BOB HERBERT

One moment the kids were laughing and skylarking on the
beach, yelling and chasing one another, sweating in the
warm bright sun. The next moment they were gone.

The world is used to horror stories, but not on the
stupefying scale of the macabre tales coming at us from the
vast and disorienting zone of death in tsunami-stricken
southern Asia. Einstein insisted that God does not play
dice with the world, but that might be a difficult notion
to sell to some of the agonized individuals who have seen
everything they've lived for washed away in a pointless
instant.

The death toll now is more than twice the number of
American G.I.'s killed in all the years of the Vietnam War.
Not just entire families, or extended families, but entire
communities were consumed by waters that rose up without
warning to destroy scores of thousands of people who were
doing nothing but going about their ordinary lives.

On Tuesday The Times ran a big front-page picture taken in
a makeshift morgue in southern India. It certainly captured
the horror. It looked for all the world like a sandy
playground covered with dead children.

Imagination pales beside the overwhelming reality of the
tragedy. There were, for example, the grief-stricken
throngs, clawing through mud and rubble, peering into the
faces of the severely injured, wandering through piles of
decaying corpses, in search of loved ones.

The Boston Globe quoted a young man whose college
sweetheart was among the more than 800 people killed when a
train carrying beachgoers in Sri Lanka was slammed by a
30-foot wall of water that lifted it from the tracks and
hurled it into a marsh. "Is this the fate that we had
planned for?" cried the young man. "My darling, you were
the only hope for me."

Perhaps a third of those killed were children. Many were
swept away before the eyes of horrified, helpless parents.
"My children! My children!" screamed a woman in Sri Lanka.
"Why didn't the water take me?"

The killer waves that moved with ferocious speed across an
unprecedented expanse of global landscape flung their
victims about with a randomness that was all but impossible
to comprehend. People in beachfront dwellings ended up in
trees, or entangled in electrical power lines, or embedded
in the mud of hillsides. People died in buses, cars and
trucks that were swept along by the waves like leaves in a
strong wind. Sunbathers were swept out to sea.

In that environment, Einstein must stand aside for
Shakespeare, whose Gloucester said: "As flies to wanton
boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport."

Any tragedy is awful for the relatives of those who
perished. But this is a catastrophe of a different
magnitude. "This," as one observer noted, "is like
confronting the apocalypse."

"What makes it especially frightening is that whole
communities have been annihilated," said Dr. John Clizbe, a
psychologist in Alexandria, Va., who, until his retirement
a couple of years ago, had served as vice president for
disaster services at the American Red Cross. He said,
"We've known for years now that the emotional devastation
that survivors feel and experience is often greater than
the physical devastation."

The recovery process is easier, he said, when there is a
supportive community to bolster those in need. But in some
of the most devastated regions of southern Asia, the
regions most in need of support, those communities have
vanished.

It's a peculiarity of modern technology that people
anywhere in the world can sit back and watch in real time,
like voyeurs, the life-and-death struggles of their fellow
humans. The planet is growing smaller and its residents
more interdependent by the day. We're fully aware that our
planetary neighbors in southern Asia are desperately
drawing upon the deepest reservoirs of fortitude and
resilience that our troubled species has at its disposal.

What this means is that we're the supportive community. All
of us. This catastrophe would at least have a silver lining
if it moved the people of the United States and other
nations toward a wiser, more genuinely cooperative
international posture.

William Faulkner, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech,
said: "I believe that man will not merely endure: he will
prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among
creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a
soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and
endurance."

That's what Faulkner believed. We'll see.

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