Dec 31
Politicking disaster
I was not planning to blog at all politically about the events in the Southern Hemisphere. I, naively or rather unrealistically, thought that people on all sides would just get on with helping the victims and not use this as an oppotunity to make a political point. It didn’t take long for the tranzis, enviroloons, left-wingnuts, and extreme isolationists to use this as opportunity to try to make a point. First we had the arsehat from the UN talk about how stingy the West, and more specifically the US, was in giving aid to poorer countries. (He has since had to back-peddle in a big way and Kofi looked positvely pale when he was challenged on this at a press conference.), then we had some moron from Greenpeace (a director) blame the event on the US’ failure to sign Kyoto and, of course, we have certain isolationists (yes, alas, including libertarians) who asking why we should care about this event. Of course the German press is getting in on the act. Then, of course, there are those from various fringe denominations blaming this on God’s wrath.
Of course, all of these people, barring the isolationists, fail to admit that this sort of event has been happening for millenia. There was even a major tsunami in the same area as this one in the middle of the 19th century. In fact, the Atlantic has this type of occurences, as pointed out in a letter to the DT.
We should recall that Atlantic tsunami are also destructive. The wave after the Grand Banks earthquake in 1929 killed dozens of people; the wave after the 1755 Lisbon earthquake may have killed as many as 100,000.
Disasters happen, and man has not, nor probably ever will, be able to completely prevent them. The earth is ever evolving and changing; not always for the better of humanity. This is not an act of god or an act of Bush, it’s merely nature doing what it always has done and always will do. What a bunch of hair-less apes do on this rotating globe does not matter that much in the long run. I am betting that this rock hurtling around the sun will be here for a very long time to come (until the sun consumes it when it goes supernova), and I would not bet humans will be here until the very end. At the risk of sounding uber-caring & sharing. Humans should worry about other humans and let mother nature get on with it. We are the ones that need the help, not her.
Or to put it another way, in the words of the Pythons:
Galaxy SongJust remember that you’re standing on a planet that’s evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
That’s orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it’s reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the ‘Milky Way’.Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars.
It’s a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick,
But out by us, it’s just three thousand light years wide.
We’re thirty thousand light years from galactic central point.
We go ‘round every two hundred million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that’s the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you’re feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere up in space,
‘Cause there’s bugger all down here on Earth.
2 Comments so far
I was particularly impressed by the Kyoto and the Bush’s Fault group. I understand that charities by their nature have to play on our emotions, but some of what I have heard has been despicable. Somewhat akin to September 11th, good day to bury bad news.
For the UN to lecture anyone on this issue is beyond parody. Perhaps Kofi should steer some of the money siphoned off from the Oil-For-Food programme to help with the relief effort. Fat chance!
Anyway, well done for pointing out that there have been some pretty dumb comments from across the political spectrum, including, I am sad to note, from so-called libertarians. Sometimes you just have to do the decent thing without endlessly trying to make an ideological point about it.
JP