The Gruesome Toll
It's beyond normal human comprehension; deaths of innocent people on such a monumental scale. The earth shudders cataclysmically, and humankind is impotent to defend itself. Life is normal with all its small successes and little irritations, its hopes and aspirations, and then suddenly another perspective entirely intrudes, its finality imperiously diminishing all human conceit. China this time, another country another time.Massive rescue efforts are still underway, but little hope is given now for the potential of discovering still-living victims of the quake's deadly impact. Countless isolated towns remain unapproachable; the very worst-impacted of the sites left in deadly disarray. Aftershocks continue to terrorize an already-traumatized populace. Tens of thousands of troops of the Peoples' Army desperately look for survivors.
China estimates that ten million of its people were caught in the aftermath of the giant quake. Beijing has agreed to accept material and practical assistance from Russia, South Korea and Singapore. There have been some isolated miracles; here and there a child, a pregnant woman found after having been buried for days. What are the mental and physical prospects for people who have suffered so monumentally?
The tens of thousands who have died leave behind family - when entire families haven't been wiped out - and neighbours, and communities, all of whom have been irreversibly stricken by the worst possible catastrophe that could impale hopes for the future on a bloody spear of blind nature blandly, stonily ordering our environment as she will.
Cities of almost a million inhabitants with fully half their buildings demolished. Those buildings still standing, in no condition to remain inhabited, and those survivors who remain huddle together for comfort under makeshift canopies, hoping for rescue, for food, for water, for medicines. No running water, no power, flimsily inadequate shelter.
China's Premier Wen Jiabao dispatched himself within hours to the quake zone, at least those parts that were approachable, giving encouragement, holding out hope, insisting that China will surmount the insurmountable. It is his government that upholds the one-child per family dictate. It is his government that has been complicit with local community leaders building multiple-story cement schools devoid of steel rods for stability.
Communist-era cheap construction, complete with corrupted contractors extracting their bribes and using substandard building methods and materials. All those families now bereft of their future, the children still to be brought out of the collapsed buildings which taught them to be good citizens. Children are the prized future of any country, no less so in China, attempting to control its burgeoning population.
China's government does want the best future possible for its people. They certainly do not want the people turning in anger upon them. Premier Wen Jiabao entreats his people to respect the zeal of the government in their herculean efforts to deploy all its resources in the arduous and desperate work to save those who can yet be saved, to treat the injured, restore reasonable habitation.
And to avert further catastrophe by attending to the hundreds of dams whose walls have been weakened and cracked, just at the very time when the season approaches when flooding can be anticipated. Order will be restored, at great cost to the country and to the people affected. Bodies are being disposed of in an effort to forestall further potential disaster.
China is not Burma.
Labels: Environment, Nature, World Crises
posted by Pieface @ Friday, May 16, 2008
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