Sunday, March 13, 2011

The Delicacy of Our Pedestal


By Rollan Schott

I watched the footage of the disastrous earthquake and tsunami in Japan with escalating despair. I have never been so frightened before a television. Here was the kind of harrowing catastrophe that should exist only in movies, and wouldn't it be nice if this were only a review.


The footage evokes an eerie dread. The shoddy home-movie footage of newsrooms and parlors rattled by the quake are heavy with the hindsight of impending doom. The news footage, shot from the omniscient safety of helicopters, is somber and quiet, the otherworldly rumble of that thirty foot wave and the roar of Tokyo and Sendai and the rest of Japan disappearing underneath it relinquished by the muffled drone of the helicopter blades. And should we ask ourselves, “What malevolent force brought this horror upon us,” an ominous, apocalyptic whirlpool marked the epicenter almost like a badge of pride. Videos showed the water, black like tar and littered with homes and cars and other debris, careening toward freeways still cluttered with moving traffic. Rivers sent fishing boats crashing into overpasses, cars bobbing along, rolling over, slamming into the sides of buildings and vanishing beneath the current. I realized I was probably watching people die. Right there. Right in front of me. I sat alone in my apartment and watched the news, and I felt very small indeed.

I try to imagine the horror of that day. I cannot. The earthquake, the worst in Japan’s history with an 8.9 rating, would have been plenty. I am quite certain that no one’s nerves had settled by the time the wave hit. Many, I would assume, knew little to nothing of the impending tsunami. I see them in their cars and their offices, in front of newsstands and living room televisions, committing their focus to their daily routines in an effort to alleviate that sense of unease, that knowledge that, though it had not yet been confirmed, this quake was special. This one was big. It just went on and on, they said, and they tried to laugh it off. The two disasters stacked upon one another must have been overwhelming. I wonder how many people saw the wave coming and merely stood in reverent submission, the biblical magnitude of it all, purging from them their petty and futile terror.

It is awful to think about, but we must not turn away from this. The devastation in Japan, if we are lucky, is the worst natural disaster we will see in our lifetimes. Early death toll estimates placed the fatalities in the hundreds. It seemed like only hours before that number cracked a thousand. Now it is well into the thousands and still climbing rapidly, with tens of thousands more reportedly missing, and I cannot fathom how many of those innocent souls were washed out to sea when the wave receded, never to be found, nor how high the death toll will even continue to rise. And now we learn that many of the nation’s numerous nuclear facilities were damaged beyond repair, and are at grave risk of catastrophic meltdown. It is relentless. That anyone at all within sixty miles of the coast survived this is altogether remarkable.

These days will forever be a dark moment in our history, and we cannot – and should not – attempt to ignore that. It is easy, and certainly tempting, to shut away these moments that illuminate the delicacy of our pedestal, that tear down the illusion we have created for ourselves of civilized order and control and dominion. We have no God-given right to happiness. That is something we managed on our own, that benign, misogynistic satisfaction that hangs by such a fine, fine thread. Happiness is but a chance privilege, provided by an indifferent universe, and there is no court to which we might appeal that privelege’s unjust suspension. There are times when ugliness rears its head and roars, and our perfect little worlds seem to shrivel away and leave us naked and scrambling for fig leaves.

There are those who will look at the disaster in Japan and see it as an act of God’s vengeful wrath. Many more will look at the death toll and say how lucky we were, how much worse it could have been, how many lives were spared that should have been lost and isn’t God wonderful - further proof that naïve optimism is our most effective weapon against the horrors of the world. But many more yet, myself included, will cite this disaster as further evidence of Mother Nature’s awesome ambivalence toward the preservation of mankind. For all of our ingenuity and our resourcefulness, our craftsmanship and our commerce, it will take the earth but a couple hours to flush it all into the sea.

And so here we are again, faced with another opportunity to cast aside our differences and prove that empathy and compassion and generosity are not merely facets of our bourgeois illusions, but fundamental pillars of our enduring survival. So please, take a moment and feel the weight of that fateful Friday morning. Allow your heart to bleed for the people of Japan. I think we must do this if we are to grow. Never mind that we often owe a great debt to those who suffer in our stead.

Once you have done this, find it within yourself to make a generous donation to the myriad relief funds already in place. Come to the aid of these people who have endured a nightmare far greater than anything most of us will ever understand. You can make a quick, painless $10 donation to the Red Cross by texting “REDCROSS” to 90999. I already have, and likely will again. Otherwise, visit the list of websites below to make further donations and learn more about the relief efforts.

Photos are emerging now of the wasteland that remains in place of one of the world’s greatest societies. Somehow many of the buildings withstood the torment, but the streets below are empty, jagged and broken and drifted over with debris, the cars and the people washed away - the morbid remains of a mutilated infrastructure. But for all the torrents that have railed against our civilization, we endure, as we always have. The people of Japan will set out in search of their loved ones. They will begin to put their country back together. They will repair their illusion. In the early hours after the water receded on Friday, it was reported that the Japanese people were still obeying their traffic lights and crosswalks in those desolate downtown streets, which is precisely the kind of minute detail that reaffirms our humanity, even now, when its fragility has never been so prescient.


Some Websites for Charity Funds and Relief Efforts.

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