Back to normal
Today is for me the last day of the New Year and Christmas holiday. I wont miss it, least of all the idea of making sure that each time I type Christmas I get Christmas and not chrstmas or chirstmas or any other such variable, the only problem now is that when I put this through the spell checker and I forget which of the Christmas's I didn't mean to change then it will look a bit stupid on the screen, but hey as everyone else has been on holiday for the past two weeks by the time anyone reads this it will be time for our Summer holidays and everyone will have forgotten about Christmas (hope this one is spelt correctly) 2004.The death toll rises steadily in the Tsunami disaster that stuck Asia, the one that we have all seen the photos of, all been amazed at the devastation that the sea can cause, the total destroying of entire villages, towns and cities, places just washed away from the face of the earth, their populations along with them. The pictures of the bloated bodies, the injured, those about to be dragged away to their deaths, for anyone who was in the water at the time one feels had no or little change of survival, the carnage. Places resembling timber yards more than towns, scrap heaps of bodies and cars, fridges and air conditioning units, twisted metal and broken wood litter everywhere along with the rubbish that will never be collected. The disease that will now spread in, contained not only in the water but also in the carcases of the dead and the once dying, a second disaster to hit the region in the space of 14 days will spread amongst them and even for some of those that survived there will be no escape from the carnage that is to come and there is little me or anyone can do to stop it, and that kills me. The aid that reaches these places will not save everyone, fact. How can places like these survive? A lot of the population who perished were living in abject poverty to start with, a poverty that we can only imagine and then this imagination is still not near the truth, the truth is so much worse. The agencies and the organisations also have to work against the sense of morality that also predominates certain parts of the region and the atrocious effects of the earthquake and the massive loss of life are all part of the great scheme of life and that those who died deserved to die and those that are left are left for a reason, even if it is to die of the spreading disease. A morality that, as I have mention in posts before, is difficult for some of us to comprehend. Also there is the enormity of it all, the total population of a city the size of Oxford just gone in a second, wiped off the face of the earth, and this just concerns the numbers not the area that the waves covered, the size of which is impossible to comprehend, a bit like the disaster itself in my mind.
And so tomorrow its back to normal, back to the semi commercial world which I inhabit, back to the god of money, not Lakshmi, but the bank of Ireland and all thoughts of pity and help will slowly disappear as we all become entwined in our own lives again. The thoughts of the Tsunami and the plight of the people and the images we see every day in the newspaper and on the television will be replaced by others of more death and destruction, more killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, more bombs in Spain or the decommissioning of the paramilitaries in the North, and a sense of normality will return to our lives and we will feel that all is well wit the world, all is back to normal.
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