The following message (subject: The Tsumani) was posted by Judy, on 12/31/2004 9:03:36 AM.

This will be a long post. I wonder if anyone will read it. Oh well, here I go anyway.

I'm still thinking about Debbie's post and her loss of faith. The Tsumani has also effected me, not because of loss of faith, because I never really had a strong sense of a God watching over me. But because it shows me how very fragile life is. Those people in Southern Asia lived right near the sea. They loved the sea, made their livings from the sea, respected the sea, yet it killed thousands of them. Most of us only going to the sea on vacations. It shows me that human beings are nothing when it comes to the forces of nature, or illness or accidents or whatever. We think we are immortal because we CAN think and reason. Then when someone dies who is so very close to us, we can't believe it. It causes us angiush and pain.

I don't think the Tsumani would have effected me like this before Ellen died. Ellen's death has made me feel more empathy for death. People are not supposed to die by the thousands and mass death is impossible for most of us to imagine. Ellen's death was impossible for me to imagine. She was immortal.

We're born, we live, then we die. We're human so we mourn our loved ones. Death is inevitable. I feel the pain of each and every person who lost a family member or friend in that Tsumani. Most of the dead are little helpless children who didn't have the strength to hold on. Life can be snuffed out in a minute.

We Americans are so isolated from other cultures, we have no idea who those people are. Seeing them weep on TV, I thought they are so different from me yet they are human and are mourning just like me. Only add a huge dollup of post traumatic stress. Only most of them won't have therapists and antidepressants and grief groups like this. How will the living survive in the midst of such disaster and the disease that will follow? And what about the post traumatic stress?

And in the midst of all this our country will go on killing people in Iraq in the name of freedom? Does that make sense? It made me furious that our President didn't take time out of his vacation schedule of clearing brush and riding horses to even make a statement to the world about the overwhelming scale of human death. He has no emthay. This is why it's so easy for him to fighting that stupid war in Iraq, killing in the name of freedom and getting rid of the "terrorists". It's easier for America to kill Asians and others who are not "white", therefore not as human as us. Our president is a shallow, unfeeling man.

I remember Ellen and I talking about 9/11 and how people had to run for their lives. I wouldn't have been able to run, I told Ellen. She said she wouldn't either. We both decided that we would have died in 9/11 if we had been out on the street. Then we talked about what it must have been like to be inside those building and know there was no escape. How were those people able to jump out of windows 90 stories up in the sky, we wondered?

Now Ellen is dead. I have to wonder all of these things by myself.

I don't know what I'm saying. I'm not a philosopher, I don't have strong religious feelings. A huge disaster like this one really makes me wonder about why, if there is a God, she would allow thousands of people to die in this horrible way.

I feel the need to quote part of Shakespeare again...."out, out brief candle, life is but a walking shadow. A poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." Was Shakespeare being negative when he wrote that? Or was he just a realist?